Irish Fever
A lecture by Meredith Linn (Bard Graduate Center)
During the Irish Potato Famine of the nineteenth century, about one million people perished from starvation and disease while more than two million fled Ireland in fear and desperation, with some 850,000 landing in New York City. Many found themselves impoverished, taking dangerous jobs, and battling miserable living conditions in an unfamiliar urban landscape. In her new book, Irish Fever: An Archaeology of Illness, Injury, and Healing in New York City, 1845–1875, Meredith B. Linn explores three kinds of afflictions—typhus fever, tuberculosis, and work-related injuries—that disproportionately affected Irish immigrants, tracing how existing medical ideas and technologies intersected with American prejudices to further conspire against this once culturally distinct group. In this talk, she will draw upon extensive archaeological remains, folklore records, and historical documents to present what she terms a “visceral historical archaeology”—a perspective rooted in historical archaeology and medical anthropology—to illuminate the experiences of these newcomers, and the history of American reception of immigrants more broadly. |
Meredith B. Linn is associate professor of historical archaeology at Bard Graduate Center. She holds a PhD from Columbia University, an MA from the University of Chicago, and a BA from Swarthmore College. Her research projects have focused upon the health-related experiences of Irish immigrants in nineteenth-century New York City and upon daily life in Seneca Village, a community founded by African American landowners and destroyed by the City of New York for the construction of Central Park. Linn was part of the team that excavated Seneca Village and is a coauthor, with Diana diZerega Wall, Nan Rothschild, and Cynthia Copeland, of the archaeological site report. She has published book chapters and journal articles about both projects and most recently, her monograph,
Irish Fever: An Archaeology of Illness, Injury, and Healing in New York City, 1845–1875 (University of Tennessee Press and the Society for Historical Archaeology). Linn is currently working on a book with Rothschild and Wall about Seneca Village and a 3D digital visualization, Envisioning Seneca Village, with Gergely Baics, Leah Meisterlin, and Myles Zhang.
