The 35th annual Irish conference of historians hosted by the Irish Committee of Historical Sciences & Maynooth University Dept. of History takes place on Fri, 12 Sep 2025 09:00 - Sat, 13 Sep 2025.
How does the individual experience history? How are lives lived against the backdrop of conflict and revolutions, of social transformation and religious change? Such questions raise a central issue of historical interpretation – that concerning the relationship between the exercise of individual agency and the circumscribing influence of social, political and cultural context. This relationship – or perhaps, more accurately, this tension – was famously captured by Karl Marx: ‘men make their own history,’ he observed, ‘but they do not make it as they please’. Taking a lead from Emma Rothschild’s 2011 study, The inner life of empires, a book which uses a single family to explore the revolutionary transformations – political, intellectual and imperial – of the eighteenth century, the 2025 Irish Conference of Historians seeks to interrogate this relationship through a wide variety of prisms.
Conference Proceedings
FRIDAY 12 SEPTEMBER
Registration from 9.00am
Welcome 9.45am
SESSION ONE 10.00am-11.15am
Panel 1: Ideas and Intellectuals
Joel Herman (TCD) A New ‘British’ History of an Atlantic Archipelago? The Case of Ireland in Pocock’s New Subject
Thomas Delaney (Maynooth University) ‘Time and Space died yesterday’: F.T. Marinetti and the Modernisation of Italy
Maria Cullen (University of Manchester) Humanitarian Action as a Performance of Cold War Identities: Examining Refugee Relief in 1980s Central America through the lens of Pierre Bourdieu’s Theory of ‘habitus’
Panel 2: Commerce, Credit and Community
Luca Bertolani Azeredo (Scuola Superiore Meridionale) La Dolce Vita? The Story of an Italian Ice-Cream Parlour in Enniskillen
Fiona Slevin (UCD) Personal Power and Agency in the Shopkeeper-Customer Credit Relationship in post-Famine Ireland
Richard McElligott (DKIT) “They were right, but they were wrong”: Kilflynn – a Community Microcosm of Ireland’s Civil War
Break (light refreshments) 11.15am-11.45am*
SESSION TWO 11.45am-1.00pm
Panel 3: Activism and Afterlives
Thomas Tormey (UCD) How and Why do Activists cease their Activism?
Gregory Walls (TCD) ‘You spy you. You were the Cause of getting my Brother shot this night 29 years ago’: Post-conflict lives in independent Ireland.
Michelle McGoff-McCann (IAPH) The Embodied Revolution: Trauma, Identity, and Political Violence Through the Lens of John Bedell Stanford MacIlwaine
Panel 4: Experiencing Upheaval
Robert D. Marshall (ICHS) Personal Ambition and Social mores: Hugh Moore
Aidan Gilsenan (Maynooth University) ‘My farm is unoccupied and worth fighting for’: The Reinstatement of Evicted Tenants, 1891-1914
Brian Hughes (Mary Immaculate College, Limerick) Experiencing the End of the Royal Irish Constabulary: Two former Policemen in the Irish Free State
Lunch 1.00pm-2.00pm*
SESSION THREE 2.00pm-3.45pm
Panel 5: Inner Lives in the Long Eighteenth Century
Liam Mac Mathuna (UCD) Three Generations of the Catholic, Irish-speaking Ó Neachtain Family navigate Life in Dublin, 1700-1750: The Evidence of their Writings
Ciarán McDonnell (Independent) Family Traditions and Foreign Wars: Irish soldiers in the Age of Revolutions
Ellinor Forster (University of Innsbruck) Self-affirmation by Surveying and Balancing one’s own Position as a Way of Coping with the Challenges of the Revolutionary Era: Practices in Salzburg and Tyrol around 1800
Benjamin Casey (Maynooth University) Women in the Early Nineteenth-Century Dublin Print Selling Trade: A Case Study of Sarah and Ann Allen
Panel 6: Inner Lives and Religion
Ronan Daly (TCD) ‘Be what they think you are’: The Spiritual Diary of Brother Daniel
Albinus O’Donnell, 1922-87
Alan Ford (University of Nottingham) Conformity and Subversion: St John Seymour and the Scholarly Culture of the Church of Ireland
Anna-Maria Hajba (Glucksman Library) Conversion and Conflict: The Wyndham Quin Family and the Oxford Movement in Ireland
Conor Brockbank (QUB) Travel Permits, Evacuees and the “neutrality” of the Irish person? The Lived Experiences of Irish Priests in England and Wales during the Second World War
Break (light refreshments) 3.45pm-4.15pm*
SESSION FOUR 4.15pm-5.45pm
Panel 7: Diasporic Lives and Activism
Tom McGrath (Maynooth University) An Irish Revolution in Africa: R.I.C. Scott-Hayward and the Irish Republican Association of South Africa
David Murphy (University of Strathclyde) Trauma, Survival and Revolution: Inter-colonial Activism of Lamine Senghor
Lewis Defrates (Maynooth University) Competing Loyalties? US Overseas Nationals in the Revolutions of 1916-23
Break 5.45-6.00pm
SESSION FIVE 6.00pm-7.00pm KEYNOTE LECTURE
Professor M’hamed Oualdi
(Department of History, European University Institute)
The life and afterlife of a Slave in the Mediterranean. And what they tell us about the Ottoman Legacies in Colonial North Africa from the mid-19th century to the 1920s
Book launches 7.00-7.25pm
Launch of Seán Ó Hoireabhárd, The Medieval Irish kings and the English invasion (Liverpool University Press, 2024), winner of the Irish Historical Studies First Book Prize (2024) and Sarah Roddy, Money and Irish Catholicism (Cambridge University Press, 2025) by Professor Peter Gray (Queen’s University Belfast, Chair of the Irish Committee for Historical Sciences).
7.30pm Conference dinner (Pugin Refectory, Maynooth campus)*
SATURDAY 13 SEPTEMBER
Registration from 9.00am
SESSION SIX 10.00am-11.15am
Panel 8: Inner Lives and Identities in Twentieth-Century Ireland
Tasneem Filaih (UCD) ‘The President said that we can have a Masjid [mosque] in this country’: Establishing a Space for Muslims in Ireland
Ian d’Alton (Independent) ‘We live our little lives and then die’: Norman Leslie, War, and a Not-so-Little Life
Felix M. Larkin (ICHS) C.E. Kelly, Cartoonist and Civil Servant: An Uneasy Duality
Panel 9: Women’s Lives in Revolution and War
Leeann Lane (DCU) ‘the enemy should never see us cry’: Mary MacSwiney, Trauma and the Brixton Hunger Strike 1920
Susan Byrne (TCD) Living through Turbulent Times – One woman’s Experience of War and Revolution in Ireland
Niamh Cullen (QUB) Making a Life during and after ‘the apocalypse’: Darina Laracy’s Experience of Living in Wartime Italy
Break (light refreshments) 11.15am-11.45am*
SESSION SEVEN 11.45am-1.00pm
Panel 10: Parenthood and Loss
Ciara Henderson (Independent) Private Loss, Public Context: The Historical Dimensions of Stillbirth in Twentieth-Century Ireland
Clodagh Tait (Mary Immaculate College, Limerick) ‘As long as God spares me, you shall not want a mother’: Other-parenting through Familial and Political Crises in Ireland, c.1640-1700
Lorraine Grimes (University of Galway) Single Mothers in Ireland and Britain: Pregnancy, Migration and Institutionalisation
Panel 11: The Creation of History through Irish-language Reclamation and Revival in the North of Ireland
Eibhlín Nic Cormaic (QUB) Feminism and the Irish language among Women Republican Prisoners
Fionnghuala Nic Roibeaird (University of Liverpool) Gaeloideachas for Critical Consciousness: The ‘Wee Irish School’ and Community Empowerment in West Belfast
Róisín Nic Liam (QUB) Youth Participation in the Irish-languages Reclamation Movement in Beál Feirste from the Long War to the Ceasefire Generations
Lunch 1.00pm-2.15pm * including launch of
R.M. Eßer & S.G. Ellis (eds), Borders, Bordering Practices and Mobility in Early Modern Europe (The Formation of Europe - Historische Formationen Europas; Vol. 14) (Wehrhahn Verlag, 2025) by Professor Marian Lyons (Maynooth University)
and
Niamh Howlin & Felix M. Larkin (eds), Confluences of Law and History: Irish Legal History Society Discourses, 2011-21 (Four Courts Press, 2025) by Dr Ian d’Alton
SESSION EIGHT 2.15pm-3.15pm KEYNOTE LECTURE
Professor Lindsey Earner-Byrne
A Female Hinterland:
Gender, Power and Human Experience in Irish History
SESSION NINE 3.15pm-4.45pm
Panel 12: Masculinity and Sexuality
Leanne Calvert (University of Limerick) ‘O! if you were a Girl how Sweetly I would embrace you’: Negotiating Same-Sex Desire and Male Intimacy in the North American Presbyterian Church, 1795-1805
Alex Jacobs (Illinois Urbana-Champaign) The “Gross Indecency” of Imperialism: How the English and Irish Used Homosexuality Scandals to Advance Political Aims
Niall Herron (QUB) Managing Queer Desire during the Northern Ireland Conflict
Conor Heffernan (Ulster University) Protein and Performative Masculinity: High-Protein Diets and the Remaking of Irish Manhood, 1980-2000
Panel 13: Life in the Shadow of Conflict: Survival and Self-Realisation in the Middle East and Africa after the Great War
Chair: Dr Anindita Bhattacharya (Maynooth University)
Dónal Hassett (Maynooth University) Grief and the Global Greater War: Tracing the Emotional History of the First World War in French Colonial Pension Files
Tylor Brand (TCD) Bearing Witness, Bearing Pain: Retrospective Accounts and the Weight of Past Disaster in Post-World War I Lebanon
Nicola Camilleri (Maynooth University) Ascari of the Empire: War Experience and Postwar Life of Local Soldiers in Italian Colonies
Close of proceedings 4.45
