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About Me

I’m an independent scholar and contract researcher with strong research expertise in Irish social and cultural history. A graduate of University College Cork, I have an MPhil in Irish History on the subject of Frank Aiken as Minister for External Affairs. My Phd was awarded by DeMontfort University in 2003 and the subsequent book, Becoming Conspicuous: Irish Travellers, Society and the State was published in 2006 by UCD Press. From 2003-04, I held the Irish Government Senior Scholarship at Hertford College, Oxford and taught at the University of Warwick. A recipient of an Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences Post-Doctoral Fellowship from 2004-06, sheIworked in NUI Maynooth developing a theory of class in nineteenth-century Ireland. From this research emerged my interest in the role played by the British military in Irish social history.

Recent Publications

My blogpost on garrison towns was reblogged by the national newspaper, The Irish Times, on 21 November 2016 http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/garrison-names-the-politics-of-irish-street-names-1.2876506

My blog was archived by the National Library of Ireland in the ‘Remembering 1916, Recording 1916’ project, a digital archive of the centenary of the 1916 Rising.

Published Books

Becoming Conspicuous: Irish Travellers, Society and the State 1922-70, (UCD Press, September 2006)

Co-editor, Ciara Breathnach, Portraying Irish Travellers: Histories and Representations (Cambridge Scholars Press, 09-2007)

Articles:

‘Waxing and waning: garrison towns in independent Ireland’, Defence Forces Review (2016) pp. 37-44

‘In search of an archive: the history of Irish Travellers’, Journal of the Irish Society of Archives, 16 (2009), pp. 3-8.

‘Confusing origins and histories: the case of Irish Travellers’, Irish Journal of Anthropology, 10, 1 (2007), pp. 30-35.

‘Policing the community: homicide and violence in Traveller and settled society’, Irish Economic and Social History, 34, (2007), pp. 47-64.

‘The “itinerant problem”: the attitudes of Dublin and Stormont governments to Irish Travellers, 1922-60’, Irish Historical Studies, 35, 137 (May 2006), pp. 81-98.

Published Book Chapters

‘Planning and philanthropy: Travellers and class boundaries in urban Ireland’, in Fintan Lane (ed.), Politics, Society and the Middle Class in Modern Ireland (Routledge, 2009), pp. 249-270.

‘Fair days and doorsteps: encounters between Travellers and settled people in twentieth-century Ireland’ in Aoife Bhreatnach and Ciara Breathnach (eds), Portraying Irish Travellers: Histories and Representations (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007) pp. 1-16.

‘A friend of the colonial powers? Frank Aiken, UN alignment and decolonization’ in Deirdre McMahon and Michael Kennedy (eds), Ireland in the United Nations 50^th Anniversary (Institute for Public Administration, 2005) pp. 182-200.

Media Coverage

Social Media

@GarrisonTowns

Country Focus

Ireland

Expertise by Geography

Ireland, Western Europe

Expertise by Chronology

19th century, 20th century

Expertise by Topic

Children & Youth, Family, Local & Regional, Material Culture, Military, Urban History, Women, World War I