As part of the Keough-Naughton Institute's spring 2024 speaker series, Sophie Cooper, lecturer in Liberal Arts at Queen's University, Belfast, will give a lecture titled “‘I Believe Colonists will Always Call Ireland by this Name of “Home”’: Adapting to a New Home Abroad within the Irish Diaspora.”
Focusing on Irish migrants during the nineteenth and early twentieth century, this lecture draws together research from Cooper's book and recent work on belonging and the built environment. It will explore some of the ways that a sense of belonging, or a sense of “home,” was created and facilitated abroad. For some in diasporic communities, this was related to the people that they surrounded themselves with, for others, it was the physical changes that they made to the world around them. This research, therefore, examines how lay and religious communities worked together, and in parallel, to make a new “home from home” across different generations.
Speaker Biography
Dr Sophie Cooper is subject lead and a lecturer in Liberal Arts at Queen’s University Belfast. Her 2022 book, Forging Identities in the Irish World: Melbourne and Chicago, c.1830-1922, was published by Edinburgh University Press and was awarded the 2023 American Conference for Irish Studies' Lawrence J. McCaffrey Prize for Books on Irish America.