IAAS’ Annual Emmerson Lecture – ‘Bad Bridget: Crime, Mayhem and the lives of Irish emigrant women’

Among the wave of emigrants from Ireland to North America were large numbers of women, many young and many travelling alone. Some prospered making new lives for themselves and sending money back home. Others quickly found themselves in trouble and on an astonishing scale. Elaine Farrell and Leanne McCormick, creators of the celebrated ‘Bad Bridget’ podcast, and the bestselling, chart topping book, Bad Bridget: Crime, mayhem and the lives of Irish emigrant women have unearthed a world in which Irish women in America actually outnumbered Irish men in prison. A world in which you could get locked up for ‘stubbornness’, and in which a serial killer called Lizzie Halliday was described by the New York Times as ‘the worst woman on earth’. Join them to hear the stories of Irish women and girls which are brilliantly strange, sometimes funny and often moving. From sex workers and thieves to kidnappers and killers, these ‘Bad Bridgets’ are women who went from the frying pan of their impoverished homeland to the fire of vast North American cities.

The lecture will take place in-person at Ulster University Belfast Campus – Lecture Theatre 1 at 6.30pm on Thursday, October 10th. Please reserve your seats through Eventbrite.

About the speakers:

Elaine Farrell’s research focuses on nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Irish gender and crime history. She has published on infanticide and concealment of birth, imprisonment and transportation, criminal tattoos, and women in WWI. She leads the AHRC-funded project, ‘“Bad Bridget”: Criminal and Deviant Irish Women in North America, 1838-1918’, with Dr Leanne McCormick (Ulster University). She is also currently working on a history of Irish female convicts in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

Leanne McCormick is Professor of History and Director of the Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland (CHOMI) at Ulster University. Her research interests include women’s history, history of sexuality and history of medicine in Ireland/Northern Ireland and the diaspora and she have published widely in these areas.

With Professor Elaine Farrell (QUB), she been working on the AHRC funded ‘Bad Bridget: Criminal and Deviant Irish Women in North America, 1838-1918’. They have produced a podcast series, an exhibition at the National Museums NI, Ulster American Folk Park in Omagh and an Irish Times #1 bestselling book, Bad Bridget: Crime, mayhem and the lives of Irish emigrant women.

About the IAAS W. A. Emmerson Lecture:

Beginning in 2014, the IAAS Lecture is an annual event, hosted at a third level institution on the island of Ireland, and presented by an invited member of the IAAS on a topic of their choosing. In 2015, the lecture was renamed the W. A. Emmerson Lecture, in honour of our much-loved late Treasurer. Broad in its remit, the IAAS Lecture appeals to both academic and non-academic communities, and promotes the long-standing interest in and connection to American culture in Ireland.