Join us for the next Design Mingle: Creative Connections event featuring Daniel Carey & Kyle Kusch, University of Galway with this project.

Join us for our Design Mingle: Creative Connections event featuring Professor Daniel Carey and Kyle Kusch from the University of Galway in association with the Imirce Project- A Collection Irish Emigrant Letters and Life Stories from North America.

Whether you’re a designer, filmmaker, writer, artist, game developer, researcher, storyteller or simply curious about the stories we inherit, there’s plenty to discover. Register below for an informative session, networking over coffee and light lunch on the day.

Background on the Imirce Project:

The Kerby A. Miller Collection Irish Emigrant Letters and Life Stories from North America.

Imirce provides access to thousands of letters, life stories, and other documents composed by Irish emigrants to North America from the seventeenth through the mid-twentieth centuries. In 2020–21, Pulitzer-shortlisted historian Prof. Kerby A. Miller, Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Missouri and Honorary Professor of History at the University of Galway, gifted the university a vast collection of emigrant correspondence and memoirs. These thousands of historical accounts from the Irish diaspora community in the U.S. and Ireland date from the late 1600s to the mid-1900s and were collected over a five-decade period. Prof. Miller’s initial gift led to the development of IMIRCE, a digital repository for the materials, which over time is being made available online. In the first phase of the project (2023-2024), letters and life stories from the Kerby A. Miller Collection were digitized, catalogued to item level, and published on a dedicated digital repository by the University of Galway Library. The second phase of the project (from late 2024) involves an appeal to the public for additional emigrant letters and life stories composed in North America. Each new donation is assessed, accessioned, digitized (where necessary), catalogued to item level, transcribed, and released to Imirce online to enable in-depth academic, genealogical, and creative research. To date, 7400 letters and 241 life stories have been published, and this number continues to grow.

Speakers

Daniel Carey is Established Professor English and Head of English at the University of Galway. His work explores the history of travel and colonialism in the early modern period (1500-1800) and the way philosophers read and engaged with travel accounts. In March 2026, he was elected President of the Royal Irish Academy. He previously served as chair of the Irish Research Council (2022-24). Digital and creative projects include The Art of Travel, 1500-1850 database and a performance piece "Letters to Ireland", based on the Imirce/Emigrant Letters database.

Kyle Kusch is Project Digital Archivist at University of Galway Library Heritage Collections, where he currently works full-time on Imirce (imirce.universityofgalway.ie), a digital project which makes thousands of Irish emigrant letters and life stories from North America freely available to researchers and the public alike. Other notable archives he has worked on at University of Galway include the personal archives of Muintir na Tíre founder Canon John Hayes, civil rights activist and barrister Kevin Boyle, and aerial archaeologist Markus Casey. He also assisted in the recent migration of the library's entire archival catalogue to a new archival management system and website. Prior to coming to Ireland, Kyle served 11 years as archivist for the Arrow Lakes Historical Society, a regional heritage organisation in southern British Columbia, Canada. He holds a Master of Arts in Geography from the University of Northern British Columbia, a Master of Arts in Archives & Records Management from University College Dublin, and a Bachelor of Science in Geography from the University of Calgary.

This project is funded by Galway City Council through its Creative Communities Fund, an initiative of the Creative Ireland Programme.

Description supplied by the event organiser.