Dr Ida Milne
The next of the Society’s online talks will be hosted by the Ireland Branch of the IGRS via Zoom, on Saturday, 30th January, at 2pm (GMT). Members will receive details by email about how to join the meeting shortly. The speaker will be Dr Ida Milne, and her talk is entitled ‘Telling the 1918-19 flu pandemic in Ireland story: family impacts and memory’.
Dr Milne researched the social, medical, demographical and political history of the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic in Ireland for her PhD dissertation in Trinity College Dublin. A unique feature of this work was the collection of oral histories from flu survivors – people who had experienced the disease as small children – at the end of their lives, where they reflected on the impact it had made.
Her work on the pandemic has been published in many fora and media, but principally in her onograph, Stacking the Coffins, Influenza, War and Revolution in Ireland, 1918-19, (Manchester University Press, 2018). Dr Milne has used her research on this earlier pandemic to inform discussion of the Covid-19 pandemic, and has been a frequent media contributor during the current crisis. She is co-chair of the Oral History Association international committee, and of the European Social Sciences History Conference health and environment strand, as well as being a member of the Royal Irish Academy Historical Sciences Committee. She is a social historian of disease, and of Irish Protestant identity, and lectures in European History at Carlow College.
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