USIHS Seminar. Online only, Thursday 13 November at 7pm.

Building to feel ‘at home’: Embedding/embedded memory in the built environments of Belfast and the diaspora.

This paper will explore the varied ways that parishioners, particularly female parishioners, have used and ‘put their mark’ on religious buildings to facilitate a sense of belonging in Ireland and abroad. Drawing on research from Sophie’s ‘Mapping Belfast’s Places of Worship’ project and her wider work on migrant belonging in the Irish diaspora, this paper explores some of the ways that people in the past used their built environments to feel ‘at home’. It will also consider some of the ways that demographic shifts have led to the repurposing or changing use of these buildings – and the (not so) hidden histories that they have embedded in them.

Dr Sophie Cooper is President of the Ulster Society of Irish Historical Studies and Senior Lecturer in Liberal Arts at Queen’s University Belfast. She is a historian of Ireland and the Irish diaspora in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Sophie’s first book Forging Identities in the Irish World: Melbourne and Chicago, c.1830-1922, was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2022 and won the ACIS Lawrence J. McCaffrey Prize for Books on Irish America.

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