PhD HISTORY

Maynooth University is one of the principal centres of research into the history of Ireland. The department offers direction of research in every period of Irish history, including local history. The research specialisations of staff are as follows:

Dr Hussam Ahmed: specialises in the social and cultural history of the modern Middle East. Other research interests include Arab intellectual history, minorities in the Middle East, colonialism, statecraft and institution building.

Professor Terence A Dooley: specialises in Irish social and political history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly the land question, the fortunes of great houses and estates, the work of the Irish Land Commission and the local politics of the revolutionary period. Has expertise also in policy matters concerning heritage and restoration.

Dr M Denise Dunne: primary research interest is in the History of European integration focusing in particular on British policy on European integration. Other areas of research include the US-European transatlantic relationship in the context of European integration and the institutional development of the European Union from inception to date. Broad research and teaching interests encompass twentieth century European and American history.

Dr Alison FitzGerald: specialises in Irish design history and material culture, in particular the study of Irish goldsmiths, jewellers and allied traders.

Professor Raymond Gillespie: social and cultural change in early modern Ireland; the diffusion of print and the changing experience of reading in Ireland 1580-1700.

Dr David Lederer: Global history; Renaissance and Reformation; early modern Germany; history of emotions; gender studies.

Professor Marian Lyons: Irish migration to Europe and migrant experiences on the continent in the early modern period, with particular emphasis on France and specifically Jacobite migrants in Paris, c.1690–c.1730. Franco-Irish diplomatic and political relations in the sixteenth century. Ireland’s trading associations with France in the early modern era. Thomas Arthur, MD, of Limerick (1590–1675). The Kildare dynasty in fifteenth and sixteenth-century Ireland. Women in late medieval and early modern Ireland.

Dr Dympna McLoughlin: specialises in gender and class nineteenth century Ireland; poverty and subsistence nineteenth century Ireland; emigration and the poor law; children, nineteenth century Ireland.

Dr JoAnne Mancini: history of the United States and its colonial antecedents; intersections of American and world history.

Dr David Murphy: specialises in military history with a particular interest in Irish regiments in British and continental service, the Crimean War, and French military archives.

Dr John Paul Newman: specialises in Balkan and Yugoslav cultural history with a particular interest in the First World War and its legacy in the region.

Professor Thomas O’Connor: Irish in Europe 1550–1800; Jansenism in 17th century; Roman Inquisition seventeenth century; political thought 1550–1700.

Dr Michael Potterton: specialises in the archaeology and history of Ireland from the twelfth to the sixteenth century, especially urban and rural landscapes, settlement and society.

Dr Jacinta Prunty: urban, social and cartographic history, with a particular focus on the mapping of towns and on the town itself in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Ireland; the history of religious life from the early nineteenth century and associated residential homes, schools and other institutions; Protestant and Catholic missionary activity; the management of religious archives.

Dr Jennifer Redmond: specialises in Irish emigration to England in the twentieth century; gender and sexual politics; demography and population change; modern Ireland; women and education; Irish women in the labour force; digital humanities.

Professor Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses: lectures in Spanish and Portuguese twentieth century history, the First World War and the development of fascism, and Europe’s colonial empires in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Research interests are centred on the First World War and Twentieth-century Portugal and its colonies.

Dr Ian Speller: research interests are in the field of military history and strategic studies, focusing in particular on maritime strategy and naval policy, the history of the Royal Navy and of expeditionary operations in the twentieth century.

Dr Jonathan Wright: a historian of Ireland and the British world in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, his research addresses two core areas: politics and political cultures in the age of revolution and reform (c.1789-1832); and British and Irish imperial history (with a particular emphasis on the Ulster experience of empire).