Originally from Portumna, County Galway, Loretto Horrigan Leary has lived in Connecticut for more than three decades. She is a writer, researcher, public historian, and former Language Arts teacher whose work explores Irish history, immigration, cultural memory, and the enduring legacy of the Great Irish Famine. The youngest of eight children, she brings to her writing an ear for storytelling, an insistence on historical evidence, and the dark Irish humor that often makes difficult histories bearable.

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Loretto is the author of Any News from Home? Irish Famine Immigrants, Essential Workers, Memory, and the Making of Irish Staten Island. Drawing upon archival records, archaeology, contemporary testimony, immigrant banking records, gravestone transcriptions, and the writings of Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, the book recovers the overlooked experiences of Irish Famine immigrants and the Irish workers who cared for them at Staten Island’s Marine Hospital and Quarantine Station.

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Her doctoral research in History at Trinity College Dublin examines how Irish Famine burial grounds in North America became contested landscapes of collective memory. Her principal case studies are Staten Island, New York; Deer Island in Boston Harbor; and Grosse Île, Quebec. Her wider research considers monuments, museums, public art, burial grounds, archival testimony, diaspora activism, and the ways communities decide whose histories will be preserved, commemorated, or forgotten.

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Loretto has researched and written exhibitions, interpretive materials, historical booklets, lectures, and public programs concerning Irish immigration, Famine-era history, and Irish Famine art. She developed the online course The Great Irish Famine: History, Diaspora, and Global Legacy and has presented her research to audiences in the United States and Ireland. Her public-history work has included serving as Education and Cultural Director of Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum of Fairfield and as Co-Chair of the Connecticut–Ireland Trade Commission.

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Her journalism and historical writing have appeared in Australia’s Irish Scene, The Irish Echo, IrishCentral, Irish Examiner USA, History Ireland, Celtic Life International, The Connacht Tribune, The Wild Geese, and Yahoo. Her literary work has appeared in New Square Literary Magazine, Prometheus Dreaming, and The MacGuffin.

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Loretto’s work is grounded in the belief that remembrance is not passive. It requires research, evidence, honest interpretation, and a willingness to ask why some histories are publicly honored while others are allowed to disappear.

She is available for lectures, presentations, panel discussions, and media interviews on collective memory, Irish Famine immigration, burial grounds and memorials in North America, public history, and the representation of the Great Irish Famine in art and public space.