Ireland and Atlantic Slavery Speaker Biographies
Darragh Gannon
Darragh Gannon is Associate Director of Global Irish Studies/Assistant Teaching Professor of Irish History at Georgetown University, and Ireland Funds Fellow at the Princess Grace Library, Monaco. He has published widely on Irish, British, and Global History. His books include Proclaiming a Republic: Ireland, 1916 and the National Collection (Irish Academic Press, 2016) and Ireland 1922: independence, partition, civil war, edited with Fearghal McGarry (Royal Irish Academy, 2021). His most recent monograph – Conflict, Diaspora, and Empire: Irish nationalism in Britain, 1912-1922 (Cambridge University Press, 2023) – was awarded the American Conference for Irish Studies Donald Murphy Prize (Honorable Mention). A former Fulbright scholar, Prof. Gannon is a regular commentator on culture and current affairs for international media outlets, including TIME magazine, BBC, RTÉ, the Irish Times, Le Monde, and ABC Australia.
Adam Rothman
Mary McAleese
Prof. Mary McAleese is Chancellor of Trinity College Dublin. She holds a Doctorate and Licentiate in Canon Law from the Pontifical Gregorian University Rome and a Master’s Degree in Canon Law from the National University of Ireland (Milltown Institute).
Mary graduated in Law from the Queen’s University of Belfast in 1973 and was called to the bar of the Inn of Court of Northern Ireland and the King’s Inns Dublin. In 1975, she was appointed Reid Professor of Criminal Law, Criminology and Penology at Trinity College Dublin and in 1987, she returned to her Alma Mater to become Director of the Institute of Professional Legal Studies. In 1994, she became the first female Pro-Vice Chancellor of the Queen’s University of Belfast. She served as President of Ireland from 1997 to 2011.
David J. Collins
David J. Collins, SJ, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of History and the Ruesch Family Distinguished Jesuit Scholar at Georgetown University. His research focuses on the intellectual history of medieval and early modern Europe, in particular religious and cultural reform movements, Renaissance humanism, and the intersection of magic with theology and the natural sciences. His recent scholarly publications include Disenchanting Albert the Great: The Life and Afterlife of a Medieval Magician (2024) and The Jesuits in the United States: A Concise History (2023). Fr. Collins chaired Georgetown’s Working Group on Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation (2015–2016), and he continues to engage with related initiatives, involving the university, the Jesuit order, and descendants of those enslaved by the Jesuits.
Maurice Jackson
Maurice Jackson is Associate Professor of History and African American Studies at Georgetown University. He served on Georgetown University’s Slavery Working Group. Prof. Jackson is the author of a number of monographs and edited volumes, including Let this voice be heard: Anthony Benezet, Father of Atlantic abolitionism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), African Americans and the Haitian Revolution: how black Washingtonians used music and sports in the fight for equality (Routledge, 2009), and, most recently, Rhythms of resistance and resilience (Georgetown University Press, 2025). Prof. Jackson was the inaugural chair, appointed by the mayor, of the Washington DC Commission on African American Affairs.
Ciaran O’Neill
Ciaran O’Neill is Ussher Associate Professor in History at Trinity College Dublin. Recent publications include Power and Powerlessness in Union Ireland: Life in a Palliative State (Oxford University Press, 2024) and O’Neill and O’Kane (eds), Ireland, Slavery, and the Caribbean: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Manchester University Press, 2023). He is Co-Pi on Trinity’s Colonial Legacies Project.
Patrick Walsh
Dr Patrick Walsh is Associate Professor in Eighteenth-Century Irish History at Trinity College Dublin. He is Co-Director of the Trinity Colonial Legacies Project and Director of the Centre of Early Modern History. He has written extensively on the political and economic history of eighteenth-century Ireland and is the author of The Making of the Protestant Ascendancy (2010) and The South Sea Bubble and Ireland: Money, Banking and Investment, 1690-1721 (2014). He is currently writing two books, the first a monograph provisionally entitled A Colonial Sinew of Power: Ireland as a Fiscal Military State, 1691-1801 and the second a jointly authored (with Prof. Ciaran O’Neill and Dr Mobeen Hussain) monograph entitled Cultivating Virtue? Trinity’s Colonial Legacies.
Mary Beth Corrigan
Mary Beth Corrigan, Ph.D., C.A., is the Librarian for Collections on Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation in the Booth Family Center for Special Collections in Lauinger Library. She has helped assess its manuscript and archival collections to prepare for the reparative description and digitization of the documentation of Jesuit enslavement. In addition to supporting projects that improve collections access for scholars, she works with Georgetown faculty who want to integrate documents into their classroom instruction and develops programs for descendants and community historians in Washington, D.C. She has deep and extensive ties with the D.C. historical community, including consultations with Tudor Place and several other historic house museums and service to the D.C. History Center.
Giselle González García
Giselle Gonzalez Garcia earned her BA in History from the University of Havana (2016) and her MA in History from Concordia University (2020). She is currently a PhD candidate at Concordia University’s School of Irish Studies under Dr. Jane McGaughey’s supervision. Giselle serves on the Executive Committee of the Society for Irish Latin American Studies (SILAS). Her research primarily examines nineteenth-century Irish migration to Cuba. Her award-winning MA thesis explored pre-Famine Irish immigrants in Santiago de Cuba (1641–1847). Notable publications include studies on Irish burials in Havana, the links between Irish immigration and African slavery in Cuba, and the environmental impacts of Irish migration to Cuban coffee plantations.
Catherine Healy
Dr Catherine Healy is DFA Historian-in-Residence at EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum in Dublin. She is the curator of ‘Entangled Islands: Ireland and the Caribbean’, a touring exhibition that has been shown at venues in Ireland, Barbados and the UK. Her first book, Intimate Connections: Irish Domestic Servants in Transatlantic Culture, will be published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2025. She holds a PhD from the Department of History at Trinity College Dublin.
Mobeen Hussain
Dr Mobeen Hussain is a Wellcome Trust Early Career Research Fellow and incoming Lecturer of Modern History at the University of York. She is a historian of the British Empire with expertise on race, gender, consumption, and medicine in South Asia. She is currently writing her first book on race, colourism, embodiment, and skin-lightening in colonial India. Mobeen also works on legacies issues, public history, and colonial ‘collections’ and economic exploitation including Trinity College Dublin’s Colonial Legacies project. She is co-authoring a monograph entitled Cultivating Virtue? Trinity’s Colonial Legacies (with Ciaran O’Neill and Patrick Walsh).
Miriam Nyhan Grey
Dr. Miriam Nyhan Grey recently joined the faculty at MIC Limerick’s Department of History, having spent a decade and a half at New York University. She is the author or editor of four books and is a
founding board member of African American Irish Diaspora Network. Most recently, her work has been animated by excavations of the intersections of race and ethnicity in comparative historical frameworks. She is the originator of Black, Brown and Green Voices, a documentation strategy and public humanities initiative supported by the Department of Foreign Affairs.
Patrick O’Malley
Patrick R. O’Malley is Professor of English at Georgetown University, where he teaches nineteenth-century British and Irish literature and culture, gender and sexuality studies, and critical theory. His book The Irish and the Imagination of Race: White Supremacy Across the Atlantic in the Nineteenth Century (Virginia, 2023) was awarded Honorable Mention for both the Lawrence J. McCaffrey Prize for Books on Irish America, granted by the American Conference for Irish Studies (ACIS), and for the Subsequent Book Prize granted by the North American Victorian Studies Association. A previous book, Liffey and Lethe: Paramnesiac History in Nineteenth-Century Anglo-Ireland (Oxford, 2017), won the ACIS Robert Rhodes Prize for Books on Irish Literature. He is also the author of Catholicism, Sexual Deviance, and Victorian Gothic Culture (Cambridge, 2006), along with several articles and essays on such writers as Maria Edgeworth, Sydney Owenson, John Henry Newman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, Sarah Grand, and James Joyce.
Shirley Lau Wong
Shirley Lau Wong is Assistant Professor of English at the US Naval Academy. She is the author of Poetics of the Local: Globalization, Place, and Contemporary Irish Poetry (SUNY Press), which won the 2024 Robert Rhodes Prize for best book in Irish literary studies, administered by the American Conference for Irish Studies. Her other scholarship has appeared in the edited collection Race in Irish Literature and Culture (Cambridge UP, 2023), Modern Language Quarterly, The Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, and The Global South.