Scholarcast 30: Memory Studies and Famine Studies: Gender, Genealogy, History

This lecture identifies and examines a number of trends in recent historiographical work on the Great Famine including their striking appropriation of narrative and fictive tropes. It explores the existence – or perceived existence – of an 'affective gap' in existing historiography, which is seen to justify this wave of new publications, a gap reinforced by the failure of most famine scholarship to reflect in depth on its own affective and emotional register. The related absence of gender as a category of analysis within studies which have emphasized national and regional scales of enquiry is highlighted in the lecture's second part, and it concludes by proposing a re-examination of gender as a lens through which, in Marianne Hirsch's words, 'through which to read the domestic and the public scenes of memorial acts'.