When people migrate, they often perform social and cultural rituals along the way. The idea of rites of passage - with its elements of preparation, departure, transit, admission, exclusion, expulsion, and return - helps us understand these moments in the process of migration in new and meaningful ways. Rituals of Migration offers snapshots of Italian and Irish migrants on the move from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. The essays in this volume examine the particular moments, actions, sentiments, and material objects in the process of migration - at the point of departure, in transit, and in the process of return. Because rites and rituals feature both nonverbal and verbal expression, migration history can be understood by studying physical objects as well as written sources. The authors focus on rituals created by migrants and their descendants, but they also consider the actions of officials who regulated migrants' departure, travel, admission, exclusion, and removal. By examining what people did, thought, felt, and packed on the eve of their departures, during their journeys, and when returning to their homelands, Rituals of Migration reveals how everyone involved in the immigration process, including the migrants themselves, the families they left behind, and those in charge of regulating their mobility, has tried to make sense of a process filled with peril, uncertainty, excitment, and opportunity.

The panel discussion will include the book's co-editor and former BC faculty member, Kevin Kenny, and three Boston College Irish Studies alumni included in the publication: Jill Bender (UNC Greensboro), Hidetaka Hirota (UC Berkeley), and Gráinne McEvoy (Notre Dame).

Kevin Kenny is Glucksman Professor of History and Director of Glucksman Ireland House at New York University. His books include Making Sense of the Molly Maguires (1998; 25th anniversary edition, 2023), The American Irish: A History (2000), Ireland and the British Empire (editor, 2024), Peaceable Kingdom Lost (2009), Diaspora: A Very Short Introduction (2013), and The Problem of Immigration in a Slaveholding Republic (2023). A past president of the Immigration and Ethnic History Society, Professor Kenny taught at Boston College for twenty years before taking up his current position at NYU. 

Jill C. Bender is Associate Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and a 2025-2026 Visiting Associate Professor at the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of the book The 1857 Indian Uprising and the British Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and numerous book chapters and journal articles. Her research has received support from several funding bodies, including the National Humanities Center, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Philosophical Society. Bender is currently working on a second book project, in which she examines the famine-era migration of women from Ireland's workhouses to colonies in Australia, Canada, and southern Africa. 

Associate Professor at UC Berkeley, Hidetaka Hirota is a social and legal historian of the United States, specializing in immigration. His major areas of research are nineteenth-century North America, US immigration law and policy, and transnational history. He is particularly interested in the history of American nativism and immigration control. His published works have examined the origins and early developments of US immigration policy from the antebellum period to the Progressive Era. Adopting a social and legal history approach, his scholarship pays equal attention ot the legal dimension of immigration control and the practical implementation of immigration laws on the ground. His first book, Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth-Century Origins of American Immigration Policy (Oxford University Press, 2017), fundamentally revises our understanding of the origins of immigration restriction in the US, especially deportation policy. His new book project examines the fundamental dilemma in American history - the tension between nativism against foreigners and the demand for their labor. 

Gráinne McEvoy is the Assistant Director of Research Programs and, from May 2025, the Interim Executive Director for the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at Notre Dame. As a writer, researcher, and teacher, she has worked within the higher education and research environment for over eighteen years, engaging with a variety of audiences through academic publications and conferences, national communications campaigns, digital media, and public history forums. Before coming to Notre Dame, Gráinne was a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow at Trinity College, Dublin, and worked at the Irish Research Council. She obtained a Ph.D. in history from Boston College in 2014, where her research examined Catholic social thought and the evolution of US immigration policy in the first half of the twentieth century. During her doctoral training, she specialized in global Irish migration, American Catholicism, and modern British history. She also holds an M.Phil in modern Irish History from Trinity College, Dublin, and an M.A. in English literature and history from the University of Edinburgh.

This event is co-sponsored by the History Department and Irish Studies.