“The Coffin Ship: Life and Death at Sea during the Great Famine,” presented by the Fund for Irish Studies at Princeton University

Cian T. McMahon, Associate Professor in the Department of History and Honors College at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, lectures on “The Coffin Ship: Life and Death at Sea during the Great Famine” with introduction by Paul Muldoon as part of the 2021-22 Fund for Irish Studies lecture series. The standard story of Ireland’s Great Famine exodus is one of tired clichés, half-truths, and dry statistics. In “The Coffin Ship,” a groundbreaking work of transnational history, McMahon offers a vibrant, fresh perspective on an oft-ignored but vital component of the migration experience: the journey itself. In so doing, McMahon makes an ambitious argument for placing the sailing ship alongside the tenement and the factory floor as a central, dynamic element of migration history.