Ruth Ann Harris received her PhD from Tufts University. She teaches Irish immigration history, concentrating on Irish women and emigration. In 1994-95 she was the Senior Research Scholar at the Institute of Irish Studies, Queen’s University, Belfast. Her research concerns Ireland’s social and economic history, and Irish emigration to England and North America. Harris is the founder and facilitator of the Boston Irish Colloquium, which began in 1993. She has served as a board member on the Council for International Exchange of Scholars (CIES), the Area Advisory Committee for Western Europe, and Subcommittee for Ireland and the United Kingdom. She also worked with the Fulbright program as a regular liaison between the Council for International Exchange of Scholars, for the U.S. Information Agency, Irish Scholarship Board, Cultural Affairs Committee of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ireland, and as a Cultural Affairs Officer, U.S. Embassy, on Fulbright Exchange Programs. Currently, she is working on a book a book length study of Irish women as immigrants, entitled Thinking Long: Irish Women Write Home. She is also working on a project analyzing characteristics of Irish immigrants in North America drawn from the "Missing Friends" column, which appeared in the Boston Pilot newspaper from 1831 through 1916.
Selected Publications:
- Introduction, The Prendergast Letters, Correspondence from Famine-Era Ireland, 1840-1850, ed. Shelley Barber (2007)
- “ ‘Come you all Courageously’: Irish Women in America Write Home,” in Eire-Ireland, Special Issue on Irish America, Spring/Summer 200l
- “Subverting Patriarchy: Irish Women, the Landlord, and Emigration from the Shirley Estate, Carrickmacross, Co. Monaghan,” in Reclaiming Gender: Transgressive Identities in Modern Ireland, eds. Marilyn Cohen and Nancy Curtin (1999)
- The Search for Missing Friends: Irish immigrant Advertisements in the Boston Pilot 1857- 1860, Co-edited with Emer O'Keefe, Volumes I-IV (1995)
- The Nearest Place That Wasn't Ireland: Early Nineteenth-Century Irish Labor Migration (1994)
617-552-1573
ruthann.harris.1@bc.edu