Cian T. McMahon, Ph.D., 2010
August 2026
I am a professor of history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas where I hold a joint appointment in the Department of History and Honors College. As a scholar of transnational history, I seek to compare, contrast, and connect the world-scattered Irish at home and abroad.
I have written three academic monographs and co-edited a major collection of essays since graduating from Carnegie Mellon. When All the World was Irish: A Global History of Saint Patrick’s Day (University of North Carolina Press, 2027) uses the history of Ireland’s national holiday as a window into the tangled relationship between migration and identity in modern life. The Routledge History of Irish America (Routledge, 2024) gathers over 40 world- class scholars to explore the dynamics that have shaped the Irish experience in America since the seventeenth century.
In The Coffin Ship: Life and Death at Sea during the Great Irish Famine (New York University Press, 2021), I use the emigrants’ own letters and diaries to show how, at every step of the journey—including the treacherous weeks at sea—migrants created new threads in the worldwide web of the Irish diaspora. The Global Dimensions of Irish Identity: Race, Nation, and the Popular Press, 1840-1880 (University of North Carolina Press, 2015), which is based on my 2010 PhD dissertation, argues that the international dispersal of millions of people during and after the Great Famine radically altered how the Irish thought about nations and nationalism. I have also published essays and articles in a range of journals including the Journal of American Ethnic History, Irish Historical Studies, and the American Historical Review.
My time at Carnegie Mellon was a valuable and precious experience. The History Department is an intimate and truly interdisciplinary community where I was exposed to a range of sources and ideas I might not have found elsewhere. In particular, meeting and working with anthropologists gave me the tools and the confidence to challenge the archives in new ways. Moreover, Pittsburgh is just a fantastically livable, exciting city where one’s stipend can go much further than in other places. In sum, I am deeply grateful for the friends, colleagues, ideas, and good times I encountered at 91视频… although I am still slightly jealous that the intramural ball hockey team that I co-founded won the championship AFTER I left for Vegas.