William Hogan
Exclusive Q&A by Brad Balfour
The American Irish Historical Society has been a hallmark of the American Irish experience in the United States since 1897. Headquartered in New York City, The AIHS is a museum, library, and cultural center. As a venue the Society hosts scholarly lectures, panel discussions, fine arts and design exhibitions, concerts, readings and historical activities. It collaborates with other organizations and institutions that share its vision of highlighting the breadth of Irish and American Irish culture.
The library and archives of the Society include a wide variety of rare books, newspapers, and artifacts from the 17th century to the present. The library houses more than 10,000 volumes of Irish and Irish American history and literature. It also holds a collection of newspapers and newsletters dating back to the late 18th century, and several early and mid-19th century newspapers such as The Nation, The United Irishman, and the Dublin Penny Journal.
Also housed in the library is the Society’s unique collection of letters from Patrick Pearse and Charles Stewart Parnell, irreplaceable archives of other societies and organizations, and the personal papers of leading Irish Americans. Complemented with works by such artists as Nathaniel Hone, John Faulkener, George Russell (A.E.), John Butler Yeats, Aloysius O’Kelly, and Augustus St. Gaudens, the Society also holds busts of noted Irish and American Irish historical figures such as Charles O’Connor, John William Goff, and President Theodore Roosevelt. There’s also an extensive collection of Irish music, including a taped interview with Brendan Behan that became his “Confessions of an Irish Rebel.”
To maintain all this, the AIHS receives income through donations, memberships, museum tours, event ticket sales, and third-party venue rentals. The quest for such revenue requires a treasurer — the latest being the recently appointed William Hogan. A Senior Managing Director of Public Finance at Assured Guaranty — which underwrites financial guaranties for a broad range of public purpose transactions in the Americas — Hogan began his career at Moody’s Investors Service. He has since held several senior underwriting and managerial positions in the bond insurance industry over that past 30 years. A graduate of Rutgers University, Hogan is a member of several industry organizations and a past Chairman of the Board of Governors for the National Federation of Municipal Analysts (NFMA).
As part of his efforts to revitalize the organization, he has the AIHS sponsoring an Irish celebration on July 21, 2025, at the Ardsley Country Club (100 North Mountain Drive, Dobbs Ferry, NY). The event will include a round of golf with a shotgun start at 12:30 p.m. followed by a dinner at 5:30 with traditional Irish food, a live band and bagpipers. A portion of the proceeds will go to City Harvest to help feed families across NYC.
Q: How did you get involved with the Society?
William Hogan: James Normile is a good friend. We’ve known each other for 30 years and he’s the current chairman of the board and brought me in as a board member. He also then asked me to become treasurer.
I’ve been on the board since January. I’ve been involved in the Society since then and obviously as you probably know, the Society has had some challenges –– financial challenges –– and we’ve been trying to rectify that. We’ve really made a lot of progress in the last six months.
The society’s probably been running with an operating deficit for the last several years. We expect to run a profit this year. We’ve increased our fundraising. We have some really committed investors. We’re doing things, we’re renting the building. Actually, we rented the building to the FBI television show. I don’t know if you’ve watched that show.
Q: “The FBI,” the one on CBS?
William Hogan: Yeah, for the finale. If you go on YouTube and look up 20th episode, Season Finale, they filmed a shootout scene in the building. We have this beautiful building. I’m not sure if you ever have toured it, but you’re always welcome. It’s on Fifth Avenue right across the park between 81st and 82nd — a beautiful location. They shot a a scene there and paid us handsomely.
Q: That’s great.
William Hogan: I think there’s a lot of opportunity for us to rent the building out, even for weddings and things like that. That can be a real source of income which we really haven’t exploited and explored [enough]. We also are doing a fundraiser — that’s my project.
I’m a senior manager for Assured Guaranty. We’re a financial services company and we do a lot of golf events. We’re a company that loves golf and golf events. We do a big one at Winged Foot every year, 150 golfers. So I’m doing this event with one of my business partners. We’ve been members there for years and it’s simple: we’re going to raise some money. We’re going to use part of the proceeds from the July 21st fundraiser to help with the archives. The archives need a lot of work.
We’ve hired a couple of curators recently, like for the past month. [We really have] a treasure trove of historical documents and artifacts and want to preserve it for future historians and future generations. That’s our top priority right now — to make sure that happens. I’m not an expert in this, but those things have to be [properly stored].
All those books are very fragile and have to be maintained at a certain temperature and in a dry climate; ultimately, we’d like to digitize them. So you just go on the internet and are able to access the content of that. That all goes forward, everything I just mentioned. That’s one of the things we’re focused on in raising funds, to protect and maintain our archives.
Q: Have you gotten to look at any of the archives yourself?
William Hogan: I have. They’re in three different rooms and a lot of what we have there are really old newspapers. I think Gena was saying the other day that we may be the only repository of certain newspapers that could be over a century old, but I haven’t actually seen them. We’re in the process of cataloging it all. That’s what our curators are doing now. Once we do that, then it’ll actually be easier to go and raise funds so we can show people what we have and how unique all this is.
It’s now valuable. The other thing that is an inspiration of mine is that I want the Society to have a charitable identity chip. A terrible event took place in the 19th century which was the famine, also referred to as the Great Hunger in Ireland. That was such a consequential event in history. It changed American history, too, because it led to a diaspora of Irish mass immigration into America.
There’s over 30 million people in the United States that claim Irish heritage. As a commemoration of the family, we want to support charities that support food insecurity and feed hungry people. We’re going to give a check through City Harvest, which is a great charity and we have a guy on our board that worked for City Harvest. So at our golf event, we will present a check to City Harvest. We’d like to do things like that going forward. We want to support those charities.
Q: Have you been conscious of your Irish background?
Hogan: Yes. I live in Ronan, New Jersey, and have another home in South Jersey — on the Jersey shore. For some years I’ve held a big party at my home around St. Patrick’s — not on St Patrick’s day — for like 25 years. I’d have 150 people in the house and would cook all the food. I’m a little bit of an amateur chef and I’d have a band. It was like a blowout St. Patty’s party. And I loved it.
Q: Where is your family from?
Hogan: I never really did the Irish Roots thing, but I want to do it. There’s a museum in Belfast, the Titanic Museum. If you go there, they have people who help your Irish roots. That’s on my bucket list of things I want to do. I want to go.
Q: Have you thought about taking those archives and doing various exhibitions?
Hogan: Yes, we have. Actually, we’re working on that right now. We’re pretty close to having enough material together to do an exhibition. I’ll keep you posted on that, but that’s something that we will do quite soon.
Q: Will you be doing more with Origin Theatre Company? They love to use the place for theatrical events.
Hogan: Yes. As part of The Society is that we want to put on as many cultural events as possible. We do events every year with the Irish Repertory Theater. We are doing a big golf event fundraiser. We had –– last year, I think –– we had their Irish Repertory theater do a reading from “The Dead,” which was with Liev Schreiber. That was fantastic. So yeah, a lot of music and culture, that’s all part of our mission.
Q: I gather you have a family, wife and kids and so on?
Hogan: I have two grown daughters. They both live in New York City. One is a software engineer. She works for Google. The other’s an artist. Actually, my daughter Erin was able to help us. She did the invitation for the outing and it’s really cool with the golf tee. She also helped us with our logo because I wanted to use the logo which was probably created a hundred years ago.
We couldn’t get a high resolution copy of the logo. It was a big deal to put on the golf ball. Erin was able to redo the logo and enhance it. She did a great job with that and did it all pro bono. She was a great help. It’s like a family at the American Irish Historical Society.
For more info go tp the organization’s website: https://aihsny.org/