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I first traveled to Ireland to study folklore as a historical source. I became fascinated with how people engage with the past, individually but even more so on social and cultural levels. For me, folk history became about not just what happened, but what people thought happened, what people imagined to have happened, and even what people told themselves didn鈥檛 happen, yet were invested in. That鈥檚 the kind of multilayered history that I wanted to engage with. I realized I had to understand how memory works, because that鈥檚 how oral traditions are passed down.

I specialize in the history of social remembrance, and my work in recent years has focused on questions of forgetting, which surprisingly turns out to be another form of remembering. I鈥檒l go to archives and specialist libraries and read against the grain, looking for traces of events that were left off of the official record though they鈥檝e been documented outside mainstream historiography. For example, the Irish Civil War of 1922鈥�23 is one of those episodes that was rarely talked about publicly, but if you look deeper, you鈥檒l find books, plays, and even films about it. Cultural commentators often assert that it鈥檚 been forgotten, but if that鈥檚 the case, then why do we know about it?

The more you study issues of memory, the more you realize that it鈥檚 everywhere. For years, I鈥檝e been working with researchers around the globe to study how the 1918鈥�19 influenza pandemic was remembered and forgotten in different societies. What I found was that quite often there was a lack of public discourse about it, but families had different ways of remembering their lost relatives in private. It鈥檚 interesting because it had been assumed by historians that that pandemic had been entirely forgotten. There was lots of cultural engagement with it, but it didn鈥檛 make the literary and artistic canon, so it was both there and not there at the same time.

I came to Boston College in 2019 as a visiting Burns Scholar, and then last year I was fortunate to become the chair of the Irish Studies department. The fact that Boston College appointed an Israeli to this distinguished role reflects a shift in the field. It鈥檚 still largely focused on history and literature, but there鈥檚 remarkable potential to reinvigorate the field by engaging with other disciplines, asking new questions, and making new connections.

I鈥檝e never left folklore, and I鈥檓 always curious about how to redefine it because it鈥檚 constantly reinventing itself. It鈥檚 not just about familiar folk tales, it鈥檚 about cultural traditions in many forms. The Internet is full of folklore, and it鈥檚 become much more multimedia.

It鈥檚 particularly interesting for me as a historian because we鈥檙e trained to look at 鈥渇acts,鈥� not folklore, but the stories people tell about their past, no matter how fanciful, have meaning and can influence their lives. It puts me in my place because, in reality, historians are very small players in the popular construction of the past. We might think that by publishing a book we鈥檝e determined how historical events will be remembered, but a movie that tells it differently will probably have more impact on people鈥檚 image of the past鈥攈ow do we engage with that? History is riddled with subjectivity, and the more we explore the complex relationship between academic knowledge and popular traditions, the more rich and meaningful history becomes.聽