Jonathan Wright

Dr Jonathan Wright joined the Department of History at Maynooth in 2014, and lectures in British and Irish History.  He holds degrees from Durham University, the University of Aberdeen and Queen’s University, Belfast. Prior to joining the Department of History he held an IRCHSS-funded postdoctoral research fellowship at Trinity College Dublin (2012-2012) and was employed as a research fellow at Queen’s University, Belfast (2012-2014).

A historian of the long eighteenth century, Dr Wright has three main research interests: politics and political cultures in the age of revolution and reform (c.1789-1832); Irish connections with empire (with a particular emphasis on the Atlantic World and on the province of Ulster and its relations with the Caribbean and with slavery); and Irish urban history (with particular reference to late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Belfast). His current writing and editing projects include a study of nocturnal criminality in late-Georgian Belfast, using the night watch records of 1812 and 1816; an edited collection of essays on representations of Belfast’s past; and a study reconstructing the story of enslaved boy, brought to Ulster in the mid-eighteenth century.

Dr Wright is a member of the editorial board of the Irish Historic Towns Atlas and a member of the committee of the Economic and Social History Society of Ireland, and he serves as reviews editor for the latter society’s journal, Irish Economic and Social History.