Acadamh na hOllscolaiochta Gaeilge

BREANDÁN MAC SUIBHNE is a historian of society and culture in modern Ireland (PhD, Carnegie Mellon, 1999). His The End of Outrage: Post-Famine Adjustment in Rural Ireland (Oxford University Press, 2017) was Irish Times Irish Non-Fiction Book of the Year in 2017. The Royal Irish Academy awarded it the inaugural Michel Déon Biennial Prize for Nonfiction and it received the Donnelly Prize for Books in History and Social Science from the American Conference for Irish Studies. His other publications include two major annotated editions, viz. John Gamble's Society and Manners in Early Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Field Day, 2011), a compendium of the travel-writing of a hard-living doctor, and, with David Dickson, Hugh Dorian's The Outer Edge of Ulster: A Memoir of Social Life in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Donegal (Lilliput, 2000, 2001; University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), the most extensive lower-class account of Ireland's Great Famine. Mac Suibhne was a founding editor, with critic Seamus Deane, of Field Day Review (2005-), a journal of political and literary culture, and, with Deane, he edited two book series, Field Files and Field Day Editions. His most recent publication is Ag Cur Chun Fónaimh (Cló Iar-Chonnacht, 2023), a collection of essays on the history of the development agency Údarás na Gaeltachta, co-edited with Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh.      

Mac Suibhne is currently at work on a monograph that uses biographical studies of the actual people on whom characters in Brian Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa (1990) are based as a portal into the social and cultural history of modern Ireland. This item gives a sense of the project:
 https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/the-inspiration-for-fr-jack-the-wee-donegal-priest-known-to-millions-1.4230588 
And he is completing a monograph on the politics of identity and revolution in north-west Ulster, that turns on reports of a haunted house in north Donegal in 1786 that was remembered differently by Catholics and Protestants; it is the subject of a lengthy essay 'Spirit, Spectre, Shade: A True Story of an Irish Haunting; or, Troublesome Pasts in the Political Culture of North-west Ulster, 1786-1972', Field Day Review, 9, 2013, 148-211; https://www.jstor.org/stable/43053618 

He has a longstanding interest in Ireland's Great Famine; see, for example, his annotated edition, with David Dickson, of the memoir of Hugh Dorian (1834-1914),  The Outer Edge of Ulster (Lilliput, 2000, University of Notre Dame Press, 2001); a collection of essays, co-edited with Enda Dealney, Ireland's Great Famine and Popular Politics (Routledge, 2015); and a pamphlet Subjects Lacking Words? The Grey Zone of Ireland's Great Famine  (Quinnipiac University and Cork University Press, 2017) . An excerpt from the last item can be read here: https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/disturbing-remains-a-story-of-black-47-1.3365683

At the University of Galway, Mac Suibhne, with Daniel Carey, English, and Cillian Joy, Library, is leading a team developing an online database that will facilitate access to Kerby A. Miller's vast collection of transcripts of Irish emigrant letters and memoirs: the database will be launched in March 2024. With David Dickson, Trinity College, Dublin, he leads an international team that is editing the extensive correspondence of the Moore family of Derry and Baltimore, Maryland, 1798-1846, for publication by the Irish Manuscript Commission: publication is expected in 2025.