academic staff information

Margaret Brehony

Arts Faculty Postgraduate Fellow

Department:  Centre for Irish Studies

Address:  Postgraduate Room, Martha Fox House, Distillery Rd., NUI Galway

Telephone:  353 (0)91 492051

Fax:  353 (0)91 495513

Email:   margaret.brehonygmail.com

Profile

Margaret Brehony completed a Masters in Culture and Colonialism at NUI Galway in 2004 and is currently conducting her doctoral research on Irish migration to Cuba, 1835-1844. Margaret will focus on the accounts of 300 Irish railroad workers, contracted in New York in 1835, to work in Havana and investigate the many questions concerning their recruitment, their experience, and their survival/settlement on the island of Cuba. Situating this migratory experience within a context of race and class politics, at a time of nationalist struggles, in two colonial islands, on either side of the Atlantic her research proposes to examine the position of this group of Irish immigrants as colonized ’Other’ within the Iberian Atlantic system of slavery and colonial labour. This research agenda  also explores the relation between Irish identification with subalternity, on one hand, and the significance of ’the wages of whiteness’ to the Irish on the other, against the backdrop of the Hispano-Cuban ’colonisation’ policy to ’whiten’ the island’s majority black population. Based on the documentary evidence that there was some opposition by the Irish to colonial rule and slavery in Cuba, the question of Irish identification with a subaltern position in Cuba will be a key area of her research.

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