Le Moyne College Calendar

Well into the second decade of the twentieth century, the state of New York was home to at least 50,000 native speakers of Irish (or Gaelic). Although over half of these individuals were located in the greater New York City area, claimants of Irish as a mother tongue could be found in virtually every county in the state, and language revivalists were active in many towns and cities throughout the region. This talk by Nick Wolf will look at the broader history of the Irish language in the centuries after 1700 as well as the hidden local story of the Irish-language diaspora in New York in these same years.

Wolf is a historian and data management librarian at New York University, where he is a member of Bobst Library’s Data Services department and an affiliated faculty of Glucksman Ireland House. He is the author of An Irish-Speaking Island (2014), a social and cultural history of Ireland’s Irish-language community in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that was awarded the Michael J. Durkan Prize for Books on Language and Culture and the Donald Murphy Prize for Distinguished First Books. His research into the social and cultural history of the Irish language, Irish Catholicism, and Ireland’s population history has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, New York University’s University Research Challenge Fund, the Newberry Library, and Newman College at the University of Melbourne.