Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum at Quinnipiac University publishes Famine Folios, a unique resource for students, scholars and researchers, as well as general readers, covering many aspects of the Famine in Ireland from 1845–1852 – the worst demographic catastrophe of nineteenth-century Europe. The essays are interdisciplinary in nature, and make available new research in Famine studies by internationally established scholars in history, art history, cultural theory, philosophy, media history, political economy, literature and music.

While many Irish-Americans identify the Great Famine of the mid-nineteenth century as the pivotal event in their ethnic history, most people in Ireland knew little about it as its 150th anniversary approached.

This essay traces lines of memory and forgetting through oral history and verbal art, from the physical experience of famine in the 1840s to the visual art of a century and a half later, examining stories of the fairies as a vernacular magical realism that attempted to get to grips with what could not be forgotten.