Public lecture by Guy Beiner

Following the establishment of the United Kingdom in 1800, loyalist Protestant communities in Ulster attempted to conceal traces of their recent involvement in the republican rebellion of 1798. Yet hidden counter-memories persisted throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and were partly co-opted by Catholic nationalists. Using folklore, literature, material culture and a miscellany of other historical sources culled from popular (or ‘unpopular’) culture, a consideration of this lesser-known episode will attempt to probe the elusive dynamics of ‘social forgetting’ in internally-conflicted territories on the margins of hegemonic states.

Guy Beiner is a senior lecturer of modern history at Ben-Gurion University in the Negev, Israel, and is currently a visiting research fellow at the Pasts, Inc. Center for Historical Studies in CEU. His book Remembering the Year of the French: Irish Folk History and Social Memory (University of Wisconsin Press) won several international awards.