JoAnne Mancini

J. M. Mancini MRIA (Ph.D., M.A., Johns Hopkins; B.A., University of Virginia) is Associate Professor in History.  Before coming to Maynooth, she taught in the University of Sussex, in University College Cork, and in Canada. She has held grants and fellowships from institutions including the Getty Research Institute, the Smithsonian Institution, the Huntington Library, the Paul Mellon Centre, the British Library's Eccles Centre, the AHRB (UK) and the IRC.  In 2021-2022 she was Terra Visiting Professor in the John F. Kennedy Institute, Freie Universität Berlin.

Research
Mancini is an interdisciplinary scholar whose historical interests intersect with interests in architecture, the built environment and cities; citizenship and migration; education; and visual and material culture.  She is also interested in how interdisciplinary historical perspectives can illuminate policy issues and decision making, particularly with reference to equality.  Her recent articles on urban teenagers, unequal provision of education and unequal access to active transport are viewable open-access in Irish Educational Studies.

Mancini’s writing has won Irish and international prizes including the 50th Anniversary Peggy O'Brien Book Prize, the Charles C. Eldredge Prize, the Patricia and Phillip Frost Essay Prize and the Yasuo Sakakibara Prize.

Her book Art and War in the Pacific World: Making, Breaking and Taking from Anson's Voyage to the Philippine-American War (California, 2018) was described as ‘essential reading for scholars interested in the global interchange of art, objects, and architecture during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’ (American Historical Review) that ‘expertly highlights . . . the impact that warfare can have on city planning and architecture’ (Journal of American History), a ‘compelling work of interdisciplinary scholarship’ (Pacific Historical Review) and ‘a remarkable work’ (Global Maritime History).  She is also the author of Pre-Modernism: Art-World Change and American Culture from the Civil War to the Armory Show (Princeton, 2005) as well as articles and essays in a wide range of international peer-reviewed journals including American Quarterly, Critical Inquiry, and the Journal of American History. 

Her collaborative research includes Architecture and Armed Conflict: The Politics of Destruction (Routledge, 2015), edited with Keith Bresnahan, and Music in American Nineteenth-Century History (Routledge, 2025), edited with Billy Coleman (also published as a special issue of the journal American Nineteenth Century History).  

She was elected to the Royal Irish Academy in 2022.