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History of the Room
This remarkable room holds one of the world’s most extensive collections of
literature and artwork on the subject of the famine that took place in Ireland
from 1845 to 1850. The room was dedicated on September 21, 2000, in honor
of Murray Lender, Marvin Lender and the members of the Lender Family,
whose generosity and dedication to promoting education and public awareness
about An Gorta Mór—The Great Hunger made the collection possible.
The Lender Family Special Collection is part of the Arnold Bernhard Library, a 48,000-square-foot facility on the Quinnipiac University campus.
The room that houses the collection was designed and built by Centerbrook
Architects, and contains a library featuring books bearing accounts of An
Gorta Mór—The Great Hunger. Some are extremely rare and were written at
or close to the time of the famine itself. This collection includes more than
700 volumes on the famine period and on peripheral issues that helped shape
the events surrounding the tragedy, as well as paintings, etchings, engravings
and sculptures commemorating The Great Hunger.
The shape of the room is meant to evoke the feeling of a ship. As you will see in
the sculptures and other artworks in the collection, ships are a powerful emblem
of the Irish Famine. As a result of the famine, more than two million people fled
to America, Australia, Canada and Great Britain to escape the suffering resulting
from The Great Hunger. The ships that carried them symbolized both the
calamity that had destroyed their lives in their homeland and hope for survival
and renewed prosperity in far-off lands.