The Broken Season
Jim Haughey
September 25, 2026, (Friday), 11:00 am, On Zoom and In person, Lunch and Presentation, The Broken Season: A Tale of Murder and Mystery in the Blue Ridge Mountains with Dr. Jim Haughey. Eve of the Civil War, remote Appalachia, and hundreds of Irish laborers are clawing out a rail tunnel through the granite of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Blasting powder will kill some, rock falls will claim others, and drink, crime, and disease prey on the survivors in their squalid camp. Just convicted of murdering another laborer, young Michael Corvan is soon to be hanged. When Jeremiah Sweeney, a world-weary priest, arrives to give Corvan his last rites, he stumbles on a secret too dark for the condemned man to confess. Will Sweeney and his assistant get past the miners’ code of silence? Will they live to see justice done?
Or will they ever leave the mountain alive?
EMAIL emerituscollege@clemson.edu for the Zoom Link
Book Signing: books will be available for sale – $16
Complimentary Lunch
Register to enjoy a complimentary lunch at the Emeritus College while learning more about the research on the pre-Civil War Irish community that worked on Stump House Tunnel and that inspired author Jim Haughey to write his first work of fiction, The Broken Season (released July 2026).
Jim Haughey attended Clemson University on a track scholarship and doubled majored in English and History. He earned an MA in English Literature at Clemson and his PhD at the University of South Carolina. He currently teaches at Anderson University in Anderson, SC. Prior published work includes The First World War in Irish Poetry (Bucknell University Press, 2002) and essays on 20th-century Irish literature in publications like The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry (2012).
The Broken Season is Haughey’s first novel.
