Padraig Kirwan is Reader in the Literature of the Americas at Goldsmiths, University of London. Padraig’s research focusses primary on Indigenous writing in the United States and Canada. He takes an interdisciplinary approach, and considers various reflections of tribal culture, experience, history and presence in the work of Native American and First Nation authors. He is the author of Sovereign Stories: Aesthetics, Autonomy and Contemporary Native American Writing (Peter Lang 2013) and was co-editor (and contributor) of the award-winning Famine Pots: The Choctaw-Irish Gift Exchange, 1847-Present (MSU, 2019). He has published extensively in many journals and edited collections including Heroes of the Ireland’s Great Hunger (Cork University Press, 2021 ), NOVEL, and the Journal of American Studies
LeAnne Howe is Eidson Distinguished Professor in American Literature at the University of Georgia. Her interests include Native and indigenous literatures, performance studies, film and indigeneity. LeAnne is an enrolled citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. Her books include Famine Pots: The Choctaw-Irish Gift Exchange, 1847-Present (with Padraig Kirwan). She was co-editor of When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations poetry (Norton, 2020). She has published award-wining novels (including Shell Shaker, 2001 and Choctalking On Other Realities, 2013) and poetry (including Evidence of Salt, 2005). She has also written plays and been co-editor, producer and screen writer for a number of films including Indian Country Diaries. She has been the recipient of many awards the most being the 2024 Arrell Gibson Lifetime Achievement Award given by the Oklahoma Department of Libraries and the Friends of the Oklahoma Center for the Book.
Gillian O’Brien is Professor of Public History at Liverpool John Moores University with a particular interest in how complex, controversial or distressing history is communicated to a wide audience. She is a board member of the Irish Museums Association and chair of its advocacy committee. Gillian has played a key role in the development of a number of heritage sites in Ireland In addition to her role on the AHRC funded ‘Sharing Lands: Reconciliation, Recognition and Reciprocity’ project she is also project lead on Convents and Cultural Heritage, funded by the Heritage She has published extensively on Dark Tourism, most notably The Darkness Echoing. Exploring Ireland’s Places of Famine, Death and Rebellion (Penguin, 2020) and ‘Captive Audience: Irish Prison Museums and their Visitors’ in Purdue and Hannan (eds) Public History in Ireland: Difficult Histories (Routledge, 2024). She is the author of Blood Runs Green: The Murder that Transfixed Gilded Age Chicago (Chicago, 2015) and has also published work on museum and heritage sites in Ireland, convents in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ireland, Anglo-Irish relations, terrorism, the history of education in Ireland, newspaper history and urban history. She has been the recipient of numerous research awards and was a Fulbright Scholar at the Newberry Library, Chicago and Irish Research Council Post-Doctoral Scholar.
More information (and access to a number of open access reports and articles) is available at gillianobrien.net
Shelley Angelie Saggar is Postdoctoral Researcher on the Sharing Lands project. Her PhD, funded by the AHRC, was titled: ‘Narrating the Museum: Contestations, Reclamations, and Refusals in Contemporary Indigenous Literature and Film’, and awarded in 2024. This project examined literary and filmic representations of the colonial museum, concentrating on texts by Indigenous writers from North America and Aotearoa New Zealand. Shelley’s research interests include Fourth Cinema, sustenance cultures and museum studies. Her work has been published in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, the Journal of Museum Ethnography and ART HX and she is the founder of The Decolonial Dictionary – a resource aimed at making postcolonial theory more accessible in museum contexts. She has worked with a range of museums including the Science Museum, Wellcome Collection, and the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology on a variety of collections research and curatorial projects.
Sharing Lands 