The University of St. Michael’s College offers congratulations to Dr. Mark McGowan on the release of his latest book, Hunger and Hope:The Famine Migration from Strokestown, Roscommon, in 1847 (Cork University Press & the Great Hunger Institute at Quinnipiac University).
Hunger and Hope is the product of 10 years of research from a joint team of historians based in Ireland, the United States and Canada. As such, says McGowan, it is a work that reflects the benefits of collaboration and the potential inherent in the Memorandum of Understanding St. Michael’s signed with Maynooth University in Ireland earlier this year.
McGowan was the lead researcher and created independent studies courses for two selected teams of senior undergraduate researchers from the University of Toronto–and particularly St. Michael’s College.
These teams explored routinely generated records—e.g., census data, cemetery records, and church registers–to uncover the story of 1,490 assisted migrants from Major Denis Mahon’s estate in Central Ireland. Three in 10 migrants did not survive the voyage or the typhus epidemic that ran rampant in the sheds of Grosse Ile, Canada’s quarantine station near Quebec.
“The book tracks the migrants from the estate through their harrowing experiences in Liverpool and their transatlantic voyage on four ships of questionable quality,” McGowan says. “It then tries to examine what happened to the survivors in Canada and the United States. It is an -eight-chapter narrative that puts names, faces, and individual stories to one of the worst and much misunderstood episodes during the Great Irish Famine.”
Notes St. Michael’s Principal, Dr. Irene Morra, “This book speaks to the extraordinary historical knowledge and level of vital enquiry that Prof. McGowan continues to manifest in his publications and that he has inspired in his students in History and in the Celtic Studies program at St Michael’s College.”
St. Michael’s Principal from 2002-2011, McGowan is a historian renowned for his work on the Great Irish Famine, as well as the lasting impact the Famine’s mass migration had on Canada.
He has won multiple awards for both his teaching and writing and is also well known for his work in Catholic education, including studying the history of Catholic education in Ontario.
His lengthy list of publications includes The Waning of the Green: Catholics, the Irish and Identity in Toronto, 1887-1922, Death or Canada: The Irish Migration to Toronto, 1847, and The Imperial Irish: Canada’s Irish Catholics Fight the Great War, 1914-1918.
Cross-appointed to the University of Toronto, McGowan served as Deputy Chair of the history department (2017-19), as Senior Advisor to the Dean of Arts & Science, International (2014-17) and as Acting Vice-Provost, Students, for the University of Toronto for part of 2013.
Most recently he served as St. Michael’s Interim Principal, from July 2020-July 2022 and continues to serve the university as as professor emeritus and special advisor to the president.