Elizabeth Stack
Profession and company: Executive Director American Irish Historical Society.
How do you celebrate your Irishness? As a recent immigrant, I feel like my Irishness is so integral to my daily life, that I don't consciously celebrate it! Aside from my work, where I honor and promote Irish culture and history every day, I cook shepherd's pie at home, drink Barry's Tea sometimes, and enjoy sampling Guinness in various bars around the city!
Name a hero you admire and why? Margaret Haughery. She was an immigrant woman whose family all died during the Yellow Fever epidemic in Baltimore in 1822, and then whose husband and baby died in New Orleans, in 1836. She then established a diary and bakery to feed New Orleans orphans, and helped to found several orphanages. She died in 1882 and a statue of her was erected in New Orleans. It is the first publicly erected statue of a woman in the United States, the first monument to an American female philanthropist, and the only known statue to a baker.
Something people would be surprised to know about me... I taught in the Emirati Airforce before I moved to New York!
Biography: Elizabeth Stack, PhD, is the Executive Director of the American Irish Historical Society in New York City. Dr. Stack was the executive director of the Irish American Heritage Museum in Albany, NY for six years before she took up the mantle at the Society. Before moving to Albany, she taught Irish and Irish American History and was Associate Director at Fordham University’s Institute of Irish Studies. She completed her PhD at Fordham, writing about Irish and German immigrants in New York at the turn of the twentieth century, as they grappled with the immigration restriction movements of that time.
