John Joyce-Kelly grew up in County Mayo, in the west of Ireland, and has spent the better part of three decades trying to understand what happened to the people who left. Trained in social history and drawn from an early age to the intersection of poverty, politics, and collective violence, he has written and lectured on the Irish diaspora experience in Britain and America, with a particular interest in the communities that formed in the immigrant slums of the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. The story of the Dead Rabbits Riot found him through a digitised edition of the New York Times from July 1857, and he has never quite managed to put it down. He lives and writes in Dublin.