Christine Kinealy


Christine Kinealy is a British historian, author, and founding director of Ireland's Great Hunger Institute at Quinnipiac University. She is an authority on Irish history.
Kinealy has lived in the United States since 2007. She was named "one of the most influential Irish Americans" in 2011 by Irish America magazine.

Early life and education

Kinealy was born and raised in Liverpool by her father, a native of County Tipperary and her mother, whose family was from County Mayo. She earned her PhD from Trinity College Dublin, where she completed her dissertation on the introduction of the Poor Law to Ireland.

Career

Following completion of her graduate studies, she worked in educational and research institutes in Dublin, Belfast and Liverpool.
In Northern Ireland in the 1980s, Kinealy taught classes in Irish history at a women’s center in the loyalist Shankill district of Belfast, covering poverty, disenfranchisement and women's issues.
In 1997, when Prime Minister Tony Blair spoke about the Great Hunger, the British House of Parliament invited her to speak about The Great Hunger. She did so in the place "where so many egregious relief policies had been made that resulted in so many tragic deaths.” In 2007 she became a tenured professor at Drew University’s Caspersen Graduate School in Madison, New Jersey.
While a professor at Drew University she documented the Irish hunger, from about 1845 to 1852, one of the first humanitarian crises covered by global media. In Irish America she described how individuals and religious groups from around the globe contributed donations.
The New York Times quoted Kinealy's assessment of responsibility typically assigned for the starvation in Ireland: “The whole British argument in the famine was that the poor are poor because of a character defect...it’s a dangerous, meanspirited and tired argument.”
In 2013, she was appointed professor of history and Irish studies at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. She serves as director of the Ireland's Great Hunger Institute at the university. Her charter includes developing an undergraduate Irish studies program at Quinnipiac.

Awards