Time: 5:00-6:00pm
Speaker: Eamon Healy (PhD in History candidate, Maynooth University)
Title: Power and persuasion: contrasting administrative solutions in two Irish Poor Law Unions during the Great Famine
Eamon Healy is a professional genealogist. He is a final year doctoral student, working on a thesis titled ‘A comparative study of Gort Poor Law Union in Galway with Ballyshannon Poor Law Union in Donegal between 1845 and 1851’. He is interested in Irish life in the first half of the nineteenth century, particularly the history of agrarian resistance, crime and punishment, landed estates, the Irish Poor Law, chain migration, and sport history.
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Time: 6:00-7:15pm
Speaker: Anna McKay (School of Histories, Languages and Cultures, University of Liverpool)
Title: ‘In the time of their desperate need’: Irish convicts in Bermuda during the Great Famine
Dr Anna McKay researches the lives and experiences of prisoners across the British maritime world. Her Anna's PhD (2020) on prison hulks - battered ex-naval warships hastily converted as floating prisons - was an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Project between the University of Leicester and Royal Museums Greenwich. These dilapidated ships held both convicts and prisoners of war at home and in overseas colonial territories including Bermuda, the Bahamas, New York, Gibraltar and Ireland. Anna has been a visiting fellowship at Yale University's Beinecke Library, the American Revolution Institute, Washington D.C., and the British Library Eccles Centre. Previous posts include a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship at University College Cork, the Pearsall Fellowship in Naval and Maritime History at the Institute of Historical Research, and a UKRI Policy Internship at the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport in Whitehall. In 2022, her article ‘‘Allowed to die’? Prison Hulks, Convict Corpses and the Inquiry of 1847’ was awarded the Alexander Prize by the Royal Historical Society. That year, she was also awarded a 'Seal of Excellence' quality label by the European Commission for a research proposal she developed with University College Cork.