Public History in Ireland

Leonie Hannan is a cultural and social historian at Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland, working on themes of gender, material culture and intellectual life. With a professional background in museums and collections, she also researches and teaches in the field of public history. Olwen Purdue is Professor of Social History at Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland, where she works on histories of urban poverty, class and power and on public history. She directs the Centre for Public History at Queen’s University Belfast, sits on the Board of Directors of the Irish Museums Association and collaborates closely with cultural partners.

Introduction: telling difficult histories in Ireland 1. Captive audience: Irish prison museums and their visitors 2. Material histories of psychiatric healthcare: building the ‘World Within Walls’ exhibition 3. Remembering lived experiences of dark pasts: transitioning Ireland’s Magdalene laundries to difficult heritage 4. A challenging task: conducting Northern Ireland’s mother and baby homes and Magdalene laundries inquiry 5. The future of the past: the Ulster Museum and social cohesion in post-conflict Northern Ireland 6. 'Colonial objects'? Museum decolonisation, binaries and autoethnography in Northern Ireland 7. Being ‘difficult’: the lives and afterlives of A.R. Hogg’s Belfast Corporation photographs (1912–1915) 8. Archiving contested places and pasts: presenting multiple voices within the Prisons Memory Archive 9. (A)Dressing history: artistic responses to painful and shameful pasts