Academic presentations on Irish culture and society past and present, moderated by Dr Dónal Gill.
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The Cuba-Ireland Immigration Database was created to provide a scholarly resource that guarantees centralized access to information about the Irish diaspora to Cuba and promotes knowledge of their presence to a wider audience. A central goal has been to enable new forms of historical inquiry into Irish migration to non-anglophone destinations, the Hispanic Caribbean, and Cuba specifically. This database centres individual migrants, recovering their names and stories from historical records while reconstructing their kinship and social connections in Cuba and their presence throughout the country. Faced with scant material evidence, this research-creation project employs innovative methods from digital history and the digital humanities by adopting a “data on biographies” and “biographies of data” approach. The project mines digitized Cuban historical archives to compile an original relational database of biographical information about Irish immigrants to Cuba, their descendants, the people they enslaved, and the people of other ethnicities with whom they associated. It aims to be the first comprehensive online resource dedicated to locating, mapping, and visualizing Irish-born peoples in Cuba.
Giselle Gonzalez is a digital historian specialized in large-scale migration datasets, network analysis, and relational data modeling. Giselle obtained her BA in History from the University of Havana in 2016, and her MA and PhD in History at Concordia University’s School of Irish Studies in 2020 and 2026, respectively. From 2018 until 2026, she worked under the supervision of Dr. Jane McGaughey. Her doctoral project resulted in the creation of The Cuba-Ireland Immigration Database (CIID) and the thesis entitled “The Cuba-Ireland Immigration Database: Social Networks, Community-building, Mobility, and Whiteness” (2026). Giselle is a member of the Executive Committee of the Society for Irish Latin American Studies (SILAS) and of the Canadian Association of Irish Studies (CAIS). Her main subject of scholarly interest is Irish migration to Cuba, family history, and genealogy. She places her professional praxis within the fields of Digital History and Digital Humanities, and employs hybrid methodologies in her output. Her MA thesis focused on Pre-Famine Irish Immigrants to Santiago de Cuba from 1641 to 1847 and won the Edward Eastman McCullough Award. She is the author of “Dying in Havana: Microhistory of the Irish Immigrants buried in the General Cemetery, 1859-1862” (2019) and “Coffee Plantations and Irish Migration to Santiago de Cuba: A Historical Case Study of Radical Environmental Transformation” (2023).