About us
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The Modern Irish History Seminar is a research seminar of the History Faculty of the University of Cambridge. It provides a forum to explore new perspectives in Irish history since 1800 and offers advanced training for graduate students, who are fully involved in planning its events and chairing sessions. The students are also encouraged to hold joint annual conferences with Irish historians from other major universities, including Edinburgh and Oxford.
Striving to go beyond traditional political polarisations, Irish history at Cambridge is inclusive in terms of methods, concepts and approaches and aware of the wider European and trans-oceanic contexts within which Irish history must be assessed.
The Seminar is methodologically eclectic and open to cognate disciplines (including geography, sociology, demographics and economics). It does not aim to produce ‘a school’, except in the sense that it is a collective and pluralist endeavor, which encourages diversity and original thinking. New ideas are explored and tested also by means of conferences, including annual graduate colloquia on specific methodological and conceptual issues (such as ‘Sectarianism’ in 2014) and major international events, such as ‘The 1916 Easter Rising in a global perspective. The “revolution that succeeded”?’ (Churchill College, Cambridge, 3-5 March 2016 https://global1916.wordpress.com/).
The Seminar meets ten times each year and is generously sponsored by the Trevelyan Fund of the History Faculty, the Embassy of Ireland in London and private benefactors.
Researchers
Eugenio Biagini
Eugenio Biagini is an alumnus of the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. He first came to Cambridge (at Sidney Sussex) in 1985, before becoming a Junior Research Fellow at Churchill College in 1987. After spending two years at the Department of History of the Newcastle upon Tyne, he became an Assistant Professor of Modern British History at Princeton. In 1996 he came back to Cambridge as a College Lecturer at Robinson College. He then became a University Lecturer in 1998 and a Reader in 2000. In 2008 he moved back to his old College, Sidney Sussex, in 2008. In 2011 he was appointed to a personal chair and he is now Professor of Modern and Contemporary History.
His research focuses on the social, economic and political history of democracy. He has written on Gladstonian liberalism and the Italian Risorgimento, but Ireland is his main area of research. His British Democracy and Irish Nationalism, 1876-1906 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007) examined the way the Irish Home Rule campaigns affected the making of democracy in the two islands. He has recently published (with Daniel Mulhall), The Shaping of Modern Ireland (Dublin, Irish Academic Press, 2016) and he is currently editing (with Mary Daly), The Cambridge Social History of Ireland since 1740 (Cambridge, Cambridge University press, 2016). His current research focuses on the history of religious and ethnic minorities in twentieth-century Ireland.
Niamh Gallagher
Niamh Gallagher is a Lecturer at the Faculty of History in modern British political history and a Fellow of St Catharine's College. Her research interests focus on the social and political history of modern Ireland and its relationship with Britain, the Empire and the development of international causes during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Her doctoral thesis (and forthcoming book with Bloomsbury) is a revisionist history of Irish involvement in the Great War. Taking a transnational approach, it argues that Irish Nationalists supported the Allied war effort for the duration of the conflict, despite the radicalisation in Nationalist sentiment after the 1916 Easter Rising and conscription crisis of April 1918, and demonstrates that much collaboration took place between Protestants and Catholics in aid of the war effort. Her next project will explore the history of organised humanitarianism through the study of the Red Cross at the end of the long nineteenth century and throughout the interwar period.
Hugh Hanley
Hugh graduated from University College Dublin in 2015 before completing the Modern British History MPhil at Cambridge in 2016. He has been awarded a Vice-Chancellor’s & Judy and Nigel Weiss Scholarship to undertake doctoral study. His previous research focused on the Irish Free State’s pursuit of sovereignty in the realm of international and inter-imperial relations, and in 2015 he published an article drawn from my undergraduate dissertation in Irish Studies in International Affairs. His MPhil dissertation dealt with how the Cumann na nGaedheal elite confronted partition and state-building and looked at the role of international relations and diplomacy in a ‘continuing Irish revolution’.
His PhD project will explore the Irish state’s interactions with the international and commonwealth spheres during the first decade after independence but will move away from the diplomatic and constitutional arenas. Handling a range of sources through the prism of the ‘Irish Empire’, he takes a world-history, cultural approach to investigate how elite hyphenated-Irish policy makers, such as heads of state, members of legislative assemblies, diplomats, journalists, and intellectuals in the Anglo-world influenced the Irish state’s pursuit of a more perfect form of independence.
Trisha Oakley Kessler
Trisha's area of research is the Jewish Community in Ireland. For the last three years she has taught on a Special Subject Paper, ‘An alternative history of Ireland: religious minorities and identity in the 26 Counties, 1900-1959’ led by Professor Eugenio Biagini. I graduated in Theology and Religious Studies from Leeds University and a Masters in the study of Jewish-Christian Relations from the Woolf Institute, Cambridge.
Presently, she is a PhD Candidate at the School of History, University College Dublin, supervised by Dr Lindsey Earner-Byrne. Her research uses as a prism Jewish refugee industries in provincial Ireland to explore the complexities of Fianna Fáil’s policy of protectionism during the 1930s. She examines how protectionism began to shape Ireland in unusual and unexpected ways, raising contested questions of national identity, change and modernity during a period of a heightened nationalist approach to the economy. Rather than viewing protectionism solely as a doomed economic policy, the arrival of Jewish refugees industries with new manufacturing skills to develop a high-fashion hat industry, calls for a reassessment of protectionism as a political, economic and cultural encounter by the Irish nation.
Christopher Morash
He is a National University of Ireland Travelling Scholar in the third year of his PhD under the supervision of Professor Eugenio Biagini. His work examines the impact that the Young Ireland generation had on state-building and nation-building in Australia, Canada, and the United States. To do so his research follows people like Thomas D’Arcy McGee, Charles Gavan Duffy, Thomas Francis Meagher, and Eva O’Doherty in the political and civic spheres of the countries to which they migrated.
He has presented papers based on his research in Cambridge, Dublin, Edinburgh, and Toronto. Prior to arriving at Cambridge, he studied for a MPhil in Irish History at Trinity College, Dublin, for a MSt in Global and Imperial History at Oxford, and for a BA at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth.
Aoife O'Leary McNeice
Aoife’s PhD research is concerned with global humanitarian networks and the Great Irish Famine, particularly focusing on networks within the British Empire, the Global Catholic Church and the Society of Friends. Her work is funded by the Cambridge Trust and the Robert Gardiner Memorial Scholarship.
She graduated from University College Cork with a joint honours degree in English
Literature and History. She was awarded the Mansion House Scholarship for her undergraduate
dissertation which examined the gender dynamics surrounding the first female university students in UCC. She was received an MSc with distinction in eighteenth and nineteenth-century literature and society from the University of Edinburgh. Her research focused on the politics of aesthetics in the work of British female travel writers during the French Revolution.
She has previously worked in collections management and digitisation at the University of
Edinburgh Library and the National Library of Scotland and is interested in the relationship
between libraries, academics and readers. She is also interested in public history and a
collaborator on the Herstory Ireland movement.
Bethan Johnson
Bethan was awarded a Vice-Chancellor's scholarship for her research into the nature of post-war violent nationalisms in Western Europe and North America.
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Her doctoral research refutes the established narrative that the mid-Cold War era lacked notable sub-state nationalisms. Instead, she has identified a coherent form of sub-state nationalism—one which attempts to gain independence through violence—in Ireland, Wales, Scotland, Canada, Spain, France and Belgium between 1965 and 1975. Her work asserts that centralisation, secularisation, internationalism, and economic inequality catalysed this iteration of nationalism and inspired groups with parallel ideologies and methodologies.
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Bethan received her MPhil in Modern British History from Queens' College, University of Cambridge for her work which showed that the Welsh national heritage preservation efforts of Lady Llanover had an anti-nationalist, political agenda. She received her B.A. in History, English and Jewish Studies from Vassar College where her history thesis investigated unusual voting patterns in interwar South Wales won the Departmental Prize.