A native of County Wexford, Prof. Kevin Whelan is one of Ireland’s best known and widely published scholars and was the inaugural Michael Smurfit Director of Notre Dame Dublin 1998-2024. During his tenure, he taught over 3,000 Notre Dame undergraduates. He has been a visiting professor at New York University, Boston College and Concordia University (Montreal). He has lectured in fourteen countries, and at the Sorbonne, Cambridge, Oxford, Torino, Berkeley, Yale, Dartmouth and Louvain.

He has written or edited over twenty books and over one hundred articles on Ireland’s history, geography and culture. These include The Tree of Liberty. Radicalism, Catholicism and the Construction of Irish Identity 1760-1830 (1996), Fellowship of Freedom: The United Irishmen and the 1798 Rebellion (1998), and the bestselling Atlas of the Irish Rural Landscape (1997, second edition 2011).

He is a former Newman Scholar at University College Dublin, and Bicentennial Research Fellow at the Royal Irish Academy. Between 1995 and 1998, he was historical advisor to the Irish government on the Famine and the 1798 Rebellion.

In this presentation Professor Kevin Whelan considers a brief history of Irish maps focusing on his native Wexford, and how they can be used to document history from below.

‘Maps are factual, but they also record peoples’ thoughts and impressions.’

Early maps are almost pictorial: from the first printed stand-alone map of Ireland in 1488; to more the scientific representational maps beginning with Petty in the 1650s. In the second quarter of the 1800s, the Ordnance Survey maps provide the finest national coverage of any nation, documenting every house, forge, mill, school, private and institutional building. By overlaying a modern O.S. map, on an earlier edition, we can often ‘recover’ details since lost, or not easily found in other historical documents.

Booking is essential as places are limited. Should you require additional support to attend this event, please contact Wexford Library on 053-9196760.

LibCal Booking Link: https://wexfordcoco.libcal.com/event/4233335