Jeff Evans. The Power of the Archive

Public Talk at the Working Class Movement Library

July 18, 2024, 5pm to 6:30pm

As The Modern Backdrop is coming to an end, we are now working on a new collaboration with the Working Class Movement Library. We established a network of members of the public, artists, academics and museum/library professionals to investigate notions of ‘class.’

In order to draw attention to the network we organise public talks once a month.

This month we are proud to announce Jeff Evan’s talk on the archives of Tarlach Mac Naillias, a political activist in Belfast during the 1980s.

The most popular and readily available history publications are dominated by the lives of elites together with atypical accounts for good or bad, that grab the headlines. Many of the unwritten stories of extra-ordinary history are missing simply because
there is little or no evidence by which the historian can capture a reliable history.

This presentation by Dr Jeff Evans, Visting Research Fellow at Liverpool John Moores University, examines Tarlach Mac Naillias, who was politically active in Belfast during the 1980s.
His personal papers tell a remarkably courageous and insightful story that significantly disrupts past histories of Belfast. Tarlach’s archive prompts the question, how many more such hidden collections exist? How richer and reliable would be the history of the city if more evidence of those ordinary, extra-ordinary lives and stories were shared and archived?