Terry Dunne successfully defended his thesis on Cultures of Resistance in pre-Famine Ireland in the Department last week.
The above image shows (From L to R): Prof. John Krinsky, CCNY (external examiner), Terry Dunne, Dr Chandana Mathur, Anthropology Dept (internal examiner), Dr Laurence Cox (supervisor).
Congratulations all.
Abstract.
So-called threatening letters were widely used in agrarian social conflicts in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ireland. Their production is associated with a series of peasant-based social movements, generically known as Whiteboys, between c. 1760 and 1850. As such they are among the first voices of ordinary Irish people that we have on record and provide a crucial insight into the subjectivities of their participants.
The thesis examines a collection of threatening notices amassed by the state authorities in southern Leinster in 1832. It explores the letters as a form of resistance to primitive accumulation and proletarianisation, explores the language of law used in the letters as a way to discuss the relationship between elite and popular cultures in this period, and explores the use of collective identity within these documents.