Imaging the Great Irish Famine: Representing Dispossession in Visual Culture

The depiction of historical humanitarian disasters in art exhibitions, news reports, monuments, and heritage landscapes has framed the harrowing images we associate with dispossession. People around the world are driven out of their homes and countries on a wave of conflict, poverty, and famine, the main sites for engaging with their loss being visual news and social media.

In a reappraisal of the viewer’s role in representations of displacement, Niamh Ann Kelly examines a wide range of commemorative visual culture from the mid-19th century Great Irish Famine. Her analysis of memorial images, objects, and locations from that period until the early 21st century shows how artefacts of historical trauma can affect understandings of enforced migrations as an ongoing form of political violence.

Perfect for students and researchers of museum and heritage studies, material culture, Irish history and contemporary visual cultures exploring dispossession.