Examination of how visual culture facilitates the memorialisation of the Great Irish Famine.

The depiction of historical humanitarian disasters in art exhibitions, news reports, monuments and heritage landscapes has framed the harrowing images we currently associate with dispossession. People across the world are driven out of their homes and countries on a wave of conflict, poverty and famine, and our main sites for engaging with their loss are 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-nineteenth-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. This book will be of interest to students and researchers of museum and heritage studies, material culture, Irish history and contemporary visual cultures exploring dispossession.

Niamh Ann Kelly combines detailed research, theory, and meticulous language to discuss the 'grievous history' and enduring legacy of the Irish famine and its impact on modern-day social and cultural concerns... the author's scholarship and range of argument makes a noteworthy contribution to visual culture studies, trauma studies, famine studies, Irish studies, and art historical and historical studies.