As part of the Black, Brown and Green Voices Series, in collaboration with NYU's John Brademas Center, the African American Irish Diaspora Network and NYPL Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, we present a public interview with Professor Mary M. Burke (University of Connecticut), on her new book, Race, Politics, and Irish America: A Gothic History (Oxford University Press, 2023), with an introduction by NYU's Professor Kimberly DaCosta.
Professor Burke publishes widely on Irish and Irish American culture, minorities, and identities. Her first book with Oxford, "Tinkers": Synge and the Cultural History of the Irish Traveller, was published in 2009, and her collaboration with Tramp Press on the reissue of Juanita Casey's The Horse of Selene reissue appeared in 2022. Her public-facing and creative work has placed with NPR, the Irish Times, RTÉ, and Faber, and she has formerly been a University of Notre Dame NEH Keough-Naughton Fellow, Trinity College Dublin LHR Visiting Fellow, MLA Irish Literature Committee chair, and NE-ACIS President. She is a graduate of TCD and Queen's University, Belfast.
Black, Brown and Green Voices represents a documentation strategy and public humanities initiative which aims to amplify the diversity of the Irish diaspora by recording interviews with Black and Brown Irish Americans and those who speak to the Black experience in Ireland and the Irish diaspora. The project director is historian Dr. Miriam Nyhan Grey who has been affiliated with New York University since 2008 and is a founding board member of the African American Irish Diaspora Network.