Dr. Elizabeth Stack is reading, writing and researching.
She’s teaching again, too, having been appointed as remote, part-time education director of Celtic Junction Arts Center in St. Paul, Minn. And as the United States’ 250th anniversary approaches, she has joined a panel of historians in an initiative out of Georgetown University, Washington DC, that will focus on the Irish dimension in the revolutionary period in late 18th century North America and Europe.
“Anything that you don’t have to grade is always good,” Stack said, with a laugh. She was referring generally to accessible “public history,” which also includes giving walking tours for Big Onion, which she began leading after she first traveled to America to do her doctorate in history at Fordham University in 2009; her stint with the Albany-based Irish American Heritage Museum from 2018-23; and her subsequent 14-month tenure as executive director of the American Irish Historical Society, her “dream job,” from which was ousted on April 12.
Stack herself won an A grade from the community. The former AIHS executive director remains much in demand: she will give a talk, for instance, to the Irish Family History Forum on Saturday morning, Oct. 25, at the Freeport Public Library in Freeport, L.I., and will receive an award from the AOH in Manhattan on Oct. 23.
Speaking for the first time publicly since the board’s decision, Stack said, “It’s heartbreaking to lose your job under any circumstances, but particularly as it eventually went down. It was very, very hard.
“It’s amazing to think how much your ego is wrapped up in your job,” she added. “I knew I loved my job but I didn’t think I identified with it so closely. There’s the embarrassment of being fired, you know, wondering if people are on your side.”
It turned out that they were.
The latest episode began on March 18 when three board members resigned in protest at its decision to make the full-time position, to which Stack was appointed after an open competition, to a part-time one. They were the historian and journalist Terry Golway, Christine Quinn, the former speaker of New York City Council, and Danny Leavy, a New York building manager who is originally from County Offaly.
“Dr. Stack has done a remarkable job reviving an organization that was dormant for years,” their statement said, dismissing the cited financial reasons for the board’s decision as making little sense.
Many were bewildered at the turn of events, as it had seemed that both the organization and the building were on the right track after another period of uncertainty and controversy.
“I am shocked,” said one letter-writer to the Echo, “I was at AIHS on St. Patrick’s Day. The house was alive. Elizabeth stood at the door and greeted everyone. There was music and dance and conviviality. I chatted with many guests, and everyone agreed that Elizabeth is a gem. Not only has she presented musical performances and scholarly lectures, but she is a force of nature, overseeing all things from performances to plumbing and heating. She does it all with wit, grace and charm.”
The entrance of the American Irish Historical Society at 991 Fifth Ave., on Manhattan's Upper East Side. [Photo by Peter McDermott]
It wasn’t that the AIHS hadn’t been on the social calendar previously, that events hadn’t happened there, that one couldn’t visit or that its rooms couldn’t be rented out. The charges of elitism tended to be driven by a fake populism that served only to deflect from the real issues at hand. Governance was one; management another.
For whatever reasons, the AIHS seemed to attract the wrong sorts of headlines (going back to the Irish Echo’s Page 1 story “Library Looted” 30 years ago). It was clearly an underachiever before Stack took charge, with none of the dynamism or vision of Irish Arts Center, the Irish Repertory Theatre, Glucksman House NYU or the New York Irish Center.
“It’s easy to give money to something that’s succeeding,” Stack said.
The AIHS has failed to pivot from being an asset-rich and cash-poor institution to something more practical and useful to the community, one that could fulfill its research and education missions and also preserve history.
“For me, it was never about the address,” Stack said, referring to the location of the Gilded Age mansion bought in 1939 when the AIHS was already more than 40 years in existence. “It was not owned by Irish people, it was not built by Irish people. It’s not about the Irish deserving a place on Fifth Avenue. We deserve a place that will allow us to preserve our records.”
In addition, to the more than 100 events AIHS organized during Stack’s tenure, it partnered on others and rented its rooms out for still more, with the eight-week run of the Irish Rep’s “The Dead” being a notable highlight. Additionally, the executive director took bookings for “FBI” and Apple TV’s morning show to film at 991 Fifth Ave.
Then one Friday evening in April, she helped move 50 chairs for a private event for one of the board members and set up the AV, before going home at 7:30. It was to be for the last time. The next morning Stack, who as sole employee had worked a 65- to 70-hour week for more than a year, found that the locks had been changed.
Stack grew up the eldest of four in Listowel, Co. Kerry, a town that is aware of its history. In more recent decades, it’s been strongly identified with literature, thanks to notables like Bryan MacMahon, the novelist and poet who founded Listowel Writers’ Week in 1970. There was also the publican next door to her family’s furniture shop, John B. Keane, arguably the country’s best-known living playwright. Stack’s parents still run the business on Williams Street founded in 1855, while her sister has a boutique on one side and Keane’s son is the proprietor of the pub on the other.
Listowel was the last town in Munster to fall to Elizabeth I; an ancestor, Red Gerard Stack, was hanged. Another, more recent forbear, a three greats-grandfather, was a member of the board of guardians of the poor house during the Famine. “It’s a very complicated history for Irish people,” she said of an event that will be the topic of her presentation in Freeport on Oct. 25. As for the poor house, it was bombed by the Black & Tans during the War of Independence.
At University College Dublin, her teachers in English literature included prominent writers and academics like Declan Kiberd and Anthony Roche, while in history she cited “giants” like Ronan Fanning, Michael Laffan and Richard Aldous among her professors. Still just 21 upon graduation with a second degree, having studied Anglo-Irish relations in the 20th century for an MA, Stack spent a few years in PR and marketing jobs in Dublin, which she recalled as “exciting, but not fulfilling.”
A friend’s death from cancer forced a rethink about her life. The friend’s mother was among those who encouraged her to go back to college. That was when she was 24. It was a second bereavement; another friend had died a few years earlier of cystic fibrosis. “It brought me back to my original love of English and history,” she remembered.
Stack enrolled for a higher diploma in education at University College Cork, which gave her a teaching qualification, and she worked in schools in Cork and Kerry, and subsequently in the United Arab Emirates, where she spent two years in Dubai and two more in Abu Dhabi. Although happy, the young teacher from County Kerry was ready by her fourth year in the Middle East for another reassessment. “I realized that I could wake up after 10 years had passed by and that I didn’t have a plan for my life,” she said.
This led to the idea of studying for a doctorate in history at Fordham. Stack is passionate about Famine-era history and 19th century Irish history more generally, but she was encouraged to do a doctoral thesis on the next generations, specifically the Irish- and German-American experiences in New York and their communities’ response to the anti-immigrant crackdown of the 1920s.
Stack enjoyed teaching at Fordham and at St. Joseph’s College in Brooklyn, but she came to understand that the tenure track in history was a difficult one, not least for a foreigner with a visa. And so her career took a new turn when she relocated to Albany seven years ago to take up the job directing the Irish American Heritage Museum.
It was located in a small space, and a move to a bigger one was part of a general transformation of an organization that thrived during the pandemic from 2020 onwards. The historian always had a strong interest in politics — she had been chairperson of the UCD Labour Party as a student, for instance — and now she had found herself in a culture where “all politics is local,” thanks to the early Irish-American influence. That was made famous in literature by investigative reporter turned novelist William Kennedy, who into his 90s has been active in the city’s cultural life.
The Irish-American aspect was now “only one facet” of the contemporary story, she said, and the museum had to be necessarily cognizant of the other stories, some of them involving America’s greatest traumas. Stack had always been passionate about women’s history, as well as labor history (she couldn't know that one day she herself would be locked out) and, of course, had studied the German experience in New York. The switch, therefore, to integrating different strands was something that was easy to embrace.
The Albany director became involved with the AIHS when asked to join an interim board during its last period of turmoil and controversy, on the understanding that she could apply later for the executive director’s position when it was advertised.
After Stack took the job, the biggest challenge turned out to be a personal one, the death of her grandmother, which took place during a trip home to Listowel last year. Family is central and it has sustained her through trying times. “I’ve a step-uncle here in New York and I visited my sister and her husband and three children in California during the summer. And that was great,” said the historian, who also has a brother living in Dublin.
And while Stack begins work in Minnesota with gratitude and considers the next steps in her career, one thought is uppermost in her mind — Christmas in Listowel.
