Peter O’Neill (University of Georgia): ‘The Dakota, the Ojibwe, and the diaries of Timothy J. Sheehan’

The diaries of Cork-born Timothy J. Sheehan (1836-1913) reveal a life immersed in the destruction of native American life and culture. An immigrant to the US at the age of 14, Sheehan took part in the two military campaigns that bookend this study––the Dakota War of 1862, and the Battle of Leech Lake in 1895. In between, he worked in Minnesota as a deputy marshal, a sheriff, and an Indian agent responsible for, among other things, a notorious Indian boarding school. Sheehan is one a number of Irish Famine refugees, who feature in this investigation of Irish involvement in the decimation of the native America––a story largely overlooked by Irish American scholarship.

Peter O'Neill is Associate Professor of English at the University of Georgia. He received his Ph.D. in English from the University of Southern California in 2010. His work has appeared in journals such as Atlantic Studies: Global Currents, Irish Studies Review , and Journal of American Studies. His teaching and research interests include comparative ethnic American literatures, transnational literary studies, theories of the state, comparative racialization, Irish migration, cultural studies, and postcolonial theory. In 2009 Palgrave Macmillan published his co-edited essay collection The Black and Green Atlantic: Crosscurrents of the African and Irish Diasporas. O'Neill's latest book, Famine Irish and the American Racial State, was published by Routledge in 2017.

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