Lecture: Jill Bender, "The Emigration Experiment: Ireland’s Workhouse Women and the British Empire"
Please join the Keough-Naughton Institute for a lecture by our 2025-26 visiting scholar Dr. Jill Bender. This lecture, titled The Emigration Experiment: Ireland’s Workhouse Women and the British Empire, is drawn from Bender’s current book project, which examines the efforts of the British imperial state to remove women from Irish workhouses and relocate them to colonies in Australia, Canada, and southern Africa. During the mid-nineteenth century, British officialdom recognized assisted migration as a strategic opportunity to depopulate specific colonial regions and socially engineer the populations of others. Often, however, authorities struggled to implement the plans, as some women refused to participate and colonial officials deemed others unfit. By exploring state-assisted female migration within an imperial context, Bender highlights both the construction of power relations crucial to imperial control and also the role of Irish women in Britain’s imperial project.
About Jill Bender
Jill C. Bender is an associate professor in the Department of History at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and a 2025-2026 Visiting Scholar at the Keough Naughton Institute for Irish Studies. She is the author The 1857 Indian Uprising and the British Empire (2016), and several book chapters and journal articles. Her research has received support from the National Humanities Center, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Philosophical Society.
Originally published at irishstudies.nd.edu.