TCG: Sharing of the Green (ft. Meaghan Dwyer-Ryan)

Sharing of the Green

A Strozier Faculty Lecture Series conversation with Dr. Meaghan Dwyer-Ryan

What does it mean to be Savannah Irish, and how can members of a diaspora be both rooted in their homelands and quintessentially American? Dr. Meaghan Dwyer-Ryan, associate director of the Center for Irish Research & Teaching at Georgia Southern, joins Leigh to discuss the growth of “St. Patrick’s Season” and whether everyone is Irish on March 17.

(Photos © FreeImages/Brian Lary, Rob Gonyea, and Bill Davenport)

To skip the intro, fast forward to the 2:24 mark.

• Part of the Robert I. Strozier Faculty Lecture Series
• “‘It’s the Ireland of This Land’: The History, Memory, and Marketing of an American Irish Sense of Place”
• Amanda Glaze-Crampes
• Abstract Irish culture and identity have long been connected to a sense of place, and for many immigrants, that place was back home in Ireland. Since the late nineteenth century, songwriters romanticized an Irish landscape, advertisers marketed products that came “direct from Ireland,” and an emerging tourism industry urged Irish Americans to “come home” to Ireland. Yet as Irish immigrants adapted to their new homes in Boston, Savannah, New York, Chicago, and elsewhere, they created their own history, culture, and identity that, while having much in common with Irish America as a whole, were shaped by local circumstances. Thus, the American-born generations developed an American Irish sense of place rooted in the urban neighborhoods where their parents and grandparents settled. They became not just Irish, or Irish American, but Boston Irish, Savannah Irish, New York Irish, and South Side Irish — identities that they celebrated in songs, stories, and St. Patrick’s Day parades. In recent decades, the celebration of localized American Irishness has become a marketable commodity well beyond the month of March, enticing tourists with merchandise, Irish-themed pub crawls, walking tours, sporting events, and music festivals. This presentation explores the history, memory, and marketing of an American Irish sense of place, particularly in the larger context of heritage tourism.