Book Launch: Irish Dressers and Delph by Meredith Chesson

Please join the Keough-Naughton Institute, the Nanovic Institute for European Studies, and the Department of Anthropology for a talk by Professor Meredith Chesson on her new book Irish Dressers & Delph (Cork University Press, 2025). Chesson will later be joined in conversation with Professor Emeritus Henry Glassie, Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at IU Bloomington. Copies of the book will be available for purchase after the event.

About Irish Dressers and Delph

How do people transform a residence into a home that nourishes both body and soul through the alchemy of homemaking? This book focuses a scholarly lens on one homemaking practice, dresser- and delph-keeping in western Connemara, where people utilise these everyday belongings and heirlooms to evoke a powerful sense of welcome and emotional wellbeing. This richly illustrated book presents the results of an anthropological and archaeological study, describing the ways that residents of the island communities of Inishbofin, Inishark, and Inishturk and the nearby mainland towns of Clifden and Cashel today and in the past use dressers to store and display delph and other possessions to convert an architectural space into a meaningful homeplace. The dressers and delph featured in this book connect people across space and through time by telling stories of social memories, personal histories, and community heritage.

Enthusiasts of Irish history, archaeology, anthropology, vernacular architecture, folklore, antiques, and material culture studies will find connections with their own heritage and homemaking practices in this volume. For more information, please visit Tangible Histories of Inishbofin, Inishturk, & Inishark.

Photo by Darragh Kane

About Meredith Chesson

As an anthropological archaeologist, Chesson’s chief interests center on the way human beings of the past and present construct and experience difference in their daily lives. Overall, she seeks to understand how people confront everyday challenges and the extraordinary changes throughout their lifetimes by investigating peoples’ homes, the belongings with which they surround themselves, and how they treat their dead.

Her interest in Irish dressers and delph was sparked after calling into friends’ homes on Inishbofin while she was conducting archaeological research on Inishark. Since 2011, she has travelled to the western islands of Inishbofin, Inishturk and Inishark and mainland towns of Clifden and Cashel to excavate, document, and research dressers and delph and conduct interviews with locals about their family heirlooms. Overall, she has catalogued more than 1600 objects and 21 dressers, learning how people in these rural towns and villages use their dressers and delph to connect themselves to their pasts while crafting a future for themselves and their families.

Originally published at irishstudies.nd.edu.