Famines and the Making of Heritage

Famines and the Making of Heritage is the first book to bring together groundbreaking research on the role of European famines in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in relation to heritage making, museology, commemoration, education, and monument creation.

Featuring contributions from famine experts across Europe and North America, the volume adopts a pioneering transnational perspective, and discusses issues such as contestable and repressed heritage, materiality, dark tourism, education on famines, oral history, multidirectional memory, and visceral empathy. Questioning why educational curricula and practices in schools and on heritage sites are region- or nation-oriented or transnational, chapters also consider whether they emphasise conflict or mutual understanding. Contributions also consider how present issues of European concern – such as globalisation, commodification, human rights, poverty, and migration – intersect with the heritage and memory of modern European famines. Lastly, the book considers what role emigrant and diasporic communities within and outside Europe play in the development of famine heritage and educational practices – and whether famine heritage is accessible to them.

Famines and the Making of Heritage provides a crucial resource for museum and heritage scholars, students and professionals working on or with difficult or dark heritages, as well as those interested in the study of famines and legacies of troubled pasts.

Marguérite Corporaal is a Full Professor of Irish Literature in Transnational Contexts at Radboud University Nijmegen.

Ingrid de Zwarte is an Assistant Professor of Economic and Environmental History at Wageningen University.