We're pleased to welcome BC Irish Studies graduate Ian Delahnty back to campus to deliver the 2024/2025 Dalsimer Lecture. 

Why did Irish immigrants, who denounced the alleged oppression of Irish people by callous landlords and British colonial authorities, act and vote in the interests of enslavers in antebellum America? Historians have explained this paradox by emphasizing immigrants' fears of labor competition with newly freed Black workers; the influence of an American Catholic hierarchy that opposed Protestant-led social reform movements; and the the welcoming embrace afforded to Irish immigrants by the proslavery Democratic Party. Drawing from portions of his newly released book Embracing Emancipation: A Transatlantic History of Irish Americans, Slavery, and the American Union, 1840-1865, Dr. Ian Delahanty offers a novel explanation for Irish-American anti-abolitionism by uncovering the emergence of an Irish critique of abolitionism in Famine-era Ireland. The Irish critique of abolitionism coalesced around a cadre of nationalists who viewed the transatlantic antislavery movement as neglectful of the welfare of Irish peasants and a distraction from the cause of Irish sovereignty. Amid the Famine migration and simultaneous acceleration of the sectional crisis over slavery, Irish-born newspaper editors, exiled nationalists, and common workers transformed the Irish critique of abolitionism into an Irish-American critique of antislavery write large. 

Ian Delahanty is an Associate Professor of History at Springfield College. His scholarship on the relationship between Irish immigrants and the transatlantic antislavery movement has been published in Britain and the World and The Journal of the Civil War Era.