UNM LIBRARIAN HONORED

March 25, 2003

UNM LIBRARIAN HONORED

The University of New Mexico General Library honors one of its own, Bruce Boling, associate professor, Tuesday, April 1, at 2 p.m. in the Willard Reading Room in Zimmerman Library.

Boling, a 17-year UNM employee, collaborated with Kerby A. Miller, University of Missouri, Columbia on the book, "Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan: Letters and Memoirs from Colonial and Revolutionary America, 1675-1815," published last week by Oxford University Press.

"As the basis of our research we transcribed more than 10,000 letters from public and private sources. In Ireland we appealed in every imaginable publication for emigrants' letters," said Boling, who will discuss the book at the event, a faculty acknowledgement reception.

Boling, a student of Irish dialects, noted that the letters were mostly composed in dialect. "The emigrants wrote the way they talked," he said.

Although the book is a resource for reconstructing the history of English dialects in Ireland, that is not its primary purpose. Preeminently it is a work of social history, which aims to explore the reasons and consequences of the earliest stage of the Irish immigration to North America. To do this the book uses letters.

The letters reveal the writers' way of thinking about things in a way that can't be attempted by second-hand sources." The letters often portray the migration from Ireland to North America as exile, a forced uprooting from the familiar to the alien, said Boling.

Boling, a member of the library's Ibero-American cataloging team, said he is "delighted" to be honored by the library.

The UNM Bookstore will be on site to sell paperbound copies of the book for $35.

The library's Faculty Acknowledgement series was established to honor outstanding faculty across campus.

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