Ciaran Walsh | www.curator.ie returns to the theme of Charles R. Browne, the Irish Headhunter for a disruptive new study of the relationship between anthropology and the political establishment in the 1890 at The Society for the Study of Nineteenth Century Ireland’s (SSNCI) annual conference conference, hosted by the School of History in University College Cork.

The conference explores the idea dwellings in nineteenth-century Ireland and Walsh uses Browne study of dwellings in Mayo in 1894, 1895 and 1896 to explore why an epidemic of typhus on the small island of Inishkea came to play a pivotal role in the escalation from home rule to revolution?

If COVID has taught us anything, Walsh argues, it is that pandemics are political events and the small epidemic in Inishkea was no different. Walsh weaves the politics of anthropology and home rule into an original an disruptive exploration of what it meant to dwell on Inishkea, that is to be an Irish native in an English colony in the 1890s.