This talk will give an introduction to the life and work of the Polish count Paul (Pawe³) Edmund Strzelecki, a figure significant in the 19th century history of Australia and Ireland. As a global traveller, in Australia Strzelecki is best-known as the one of the earliest European explorers and mappers of Gippsland, which he named, along with Australia’s highest peak, Mount Ko¶ciuszko. In Ireland, Strzelecki played a major role in humanitarian aid during the Great Famine of the 1840s, as one of the primary agents of the British Relief Association.

Strzelecki was the subject of an exhibition produced by Professor Peter Gray (Queen’s University Belfast) and Associate Professor Emily Mark-FitzGerald (University College Dublin), in collaboration with the Polish Embassy of Ireland and launched at the Royal Academy of Ireland, which has toured in both Ireland and Australia.

Professor Gray and Assoc. Professor Mark-FitzGerald are the current O’Donnell Research Fellows in Irish Studies at Newman College, University of Melbourne. Peter Gray Professor of Modern Irish History at Queen’s University Belfast. He was Head of the School of History and Anthropology 2010-15 and has been Director of the Institute of Irish Studies at QUB since 2016. Professor Gray specializes in the history of British-Irish relations c.1800-70, especially the political history of the Great Famine of 1845-50 and the politics of poverty and land in the nineteenth century. Selected publications include The making of the Irish poor law 1815-43 (Manchester UP, 2009); Famine, land and politics: British government and Irish society 1843–1850 (Irish Academic Press, 1999); The Irish Famine (Thames & Hudson, 1995).

Emily Mark-FitzGerald is Associate Professor in Art History and Cultural Policy at University College Dublin. She was Head of the School of Art History and Cultural Policy from 2019-22, and one of the Directors of the Irish Museums Association from 2009-18. She specialises in Irish art and visual culture, historical photography, famine/migration studies, museum/heritage studies, and cultural policy from the 19th c. to the present. Publications include Dublin and the Great Irish Famine (coedited, UCD Press, 2022), The Great Irish Famine: Visual and Material Culture (coedited, Liverpool UP, 2018) and Commemorating the Irish Famine: Memory and the Monument (Liverpool UP, 2013).