Dr. Miriam Nyhan
Research interests
American history, Irish America, 20th century Ireland, migration history and diaspora, race and ethnicity, oral history, memory studies and public humanities.
More information
Having completed her PhD in History at the European University Institute in Florence, Miriam spent a decade and a half at New York University where she taught undergraduate and graduate courses and was Associate Director of NYU’s Glucksman Ireland House, Director of the MA in Irish Studies, NYU’s Global Coordinator for Irish Studies, Co-director of the Archives of Irish America Oral History Collection. She also sat on both the advisory and editorial boards at NYU.
A founding board member of the non-profit organisation African American Irish Diaspora Network, Miriam is the originator of the innovative Black, Brown and Green Voices program which is an ongoing public humanities initiative with African American Irish Diaspora Network, New York Public Library Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, NYU and the Department of Foreign Affairs.
She was the inaugural Associate Editor of the NYU Press Glucksman Irish Diaspora Series and is a regular co-editor of the American Journal of Irish Studies. She is the author of 'Are You Still Below?' The Ford Marina Plant, Cork, 1917-1984 (Collins Press, 2007); the editor of Ireland's Allies: America and the 1916 Easter Rising (UCD Press, 2016), the co-editor of Forged in America: How Irish-Jewish Encounters Shaped a Nation (NYU Press, 2023) and the editor of 'A Tract For Our Times': A Retrospective on Joe Lee's 'Ireland 1912-1985' (UCD Press, 2024).
She has extensive experience in public humanities both in the US and in Ireland and she has undertaken projects with the Royal Irish Academy, the National Archives (Ireland), the Department of Foreign Affairs, and the Department of Education. Her curatorial projects have been exhibited at the National Library of Ireland, the Linen Hall Library, NYU and the Consulate of Ireland (New York). From 2014 to 2023 she was host and producer of This Irish American Life, a weekly radio hour on public radio in New York City. She is a member of the Royal Irish Academy's Working Group on Culture and Heritage. Her current research agenda is animated by the intersections of race, ethnicity and imperial legacies in the Irish diasporic experience, with a special interest in the United States and the Caribbean.
