I am a historian of twentieth-century Europe. I took my BA and PhD degrees at Trinity College Dublin. I was a postdoctoral research fellow at TCD between 2012 and 2015. I took up the position of Lecturer in Modern History at Swansea University in September 2015. I was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2018 and currently convene the Conflict, Reconstruction and Memory research group.
I teach across a range of modules on twentieth-century history at Swansea, including a final year special subject module about the League of Nations called ‘The Lights that Failed’ and a final year option module about the Irish Revolution called ‘Changed Utterly?’
I am currently writing a book called Feeding the Mind: Humanitarianism and the reconstruction of European intellectual life, 1919-1933 which explores humanitarian aid to Europe after the First World War and its role in rebuilding intellectual and cultural life. The book is under contract with Cambridge University Press.
I am also currently researching cultural destruction during the First World War and its diplomatic consequences in the inter-war years.
My doctoral and postdoctoral research focused on the cultural history of the First World War and its impact upon universities and transnational intellectual communities. This formed the basis of my two books, The University at War 1914-25: Britain, France and the United States (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), and Trinity in War and Revolution, 1912-23 (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy Press, 2015).
The University at War 1914-25: Britain, France, and the United States, was awarded the Kevin Brehony prize by the History of Education Society in 2017.
In 2018 I was selected to take part in the award-winning Welsh Crucible programme which promotes the development of Wales’ future research leaders.
In 1912 Ireland was an integral part of the British Empire and the Union which bound the United Kingdom together. By 1923, the island of Ireland had been partitioned, with 26 southern counties now constituting an independent Free State, while six northern counties now formed a new entity known as Northern Ireland. In the intervening years, the island of Ireland had experienced the trauma of the First World War, the shock of a nationalist rebellion in Dublin in 1916, the outbreak of a War of Independence between 1919 and 1921, and a bitter Civil War between 1922 and 1923. In the words of W.B. Yeats all was `changed, changed utterly.¿ This module will explore the political, cultural, and social changes of this period in Irish and British history. Looking at primary source accounts of the period, it will examine issues such as how the future of Ireland was imagined in 1912; different forms of nationalism and unionism; Irish involvement in the First World War; the righteousness of the Easter Rising; the role of women in political activism; the contentious events of the War of Independence and Civil War; the consequences of Irish independence for Britain and the British Empire. It will also encourage students to think about how divisive historical events should be remembered. This module will be 40% political history, 30% cultural history, and 30% social history.
In 1912 Ireland was an integral part of the British Empire and the Union which bound the United Kingdom together. By 1923, the island of Ireland had been partitioned, with 26 southern counties now constituting an independent Free State, while six northern counties now formed a new entity known as Northern Ireland. In the intervening years, the island of Ireland had experienced the trauma of the First World War, the shock of a nationalist rebellion in Dublin in 1916, the outbreak of a War of Independence between 1919 and 1921, and a bitter Civil War between 1922 and 1923. In the words of W.B. Yeats all was `changed, changed utterly.¿ This module will explore the political, cultural, and social changes of this period in Irish and British history. Looking at primary source accounts of the period, it will examine issues such as how the future of Ireland was imagined in 1912; different forms of nationalism and unionism; Irish involvement in the First World War; the righteousness of the Easter Rising; the role of women in political activism; the contentious events of the War of Independence and Civil War; the consequences of Irish independence for Britain and the British Empire. It will also encourage students to think about how divisive historical events should be remembered. This module will be 40% political history, 30% cultural history, and 30% social history.
Students produce a dissertation of up to 20,000 words on a historical topic, chosen in conjunction with their supervisor. This represents the culmination of the History MAs, and constitutes Part Two of the programme.
This module provides an introduction to advanced historiography. It is designed to develop students¿ awareness of traditional historiographical concerns alongside their knowledge current trends and new directions in writing and thinking about the past.
This module is designed to help students to identify a dissertation topic appropriate to their interests and expertise, and to tackle the problems of methodology, develop the research techniques, and undertake the project planning which are the necessary preliminaries to researching and writing a 20,000 word dissertation.
The nineteenth century saw the rise of a western European civilization, characterized, as Eric Hobsbawm has noted, by capitalist economics, liberal politics, and the dominance of a middle class that celebrated morality and science. In the twentieth century this civilization faced unprecedented challenges from new political ideologies, and from a working class demanding the right to govern in its own name. The result was an eruption of violence not seen on the continent for centuries; in its wake, the Cold War divided the Europe with an Iron Curtain, and saw the continent become the client of two world superpowers ¿ the USA and the Soviet Union. This team-taught module relies on the specialist knowledge of its tutors to examine economic, political and social themes in the history of nineteenth and twentieth-century Europe.
History is an imprecise art and what historians say and write about the past is not the same as what actually happened in the past. Most people's knowledge about the past doesn't come from professional historians at all but rather from 'public history'. Public history is the collective understandings of the past that exist outside academic discipline of history. It is derived from a diverse range of sources including oral traditions, legends, literature, art, films and television. This module will introduce you to the study and presentation of the past. It will consider how the content, aims and methods of academic and public history compare and contrast and you will engage in your own small research project to investigate this. The module will also teach you about the fundamentals of studying and writing history at university. You will learn about essay writing, group work and critical analysis and employ these skills to understand and assess history today, both as an academic activity and as public knowledge.
This module will provide an overview of the history of British politics, society, culture, and the economy from c. 1800 to the present, from a national and international perspective. The lectures and seminars for this module will give students the opportunity to engage closely with events, processes, and people - both male and female, from diverse ethnic backgrounds - who contributed to the making of the modern British state and society, and who defined Britain¿s relationship with the wider world. We will discuss the transformative impact of warfare, Empire and colonialism, industrial and technological change. We will also consider the significance of race, class, and gender, and how they relate to national sentiment and social and political emancipation movements in Britain and beyond.
The purpose of the module is to encourage you to think more deeply about how historians work and, in particular, about how we as historians can locate and use primary historical sources effectively as a means of interpreting and understanding the past. During the module we will learn about the survival of historical evidence, how it is organised and made accessible to historians to undertake their research, and how to effectively locate and interpret it in your studies. We will consider how the process of doing historical research changes over time, in particular with the impact of recent developments like digitization. At the core of the module will be the work you undertake with others in your seminar group using a range of primary sources which your seminar tutor will introduce to you. As part of the module assessment you will also undertake your own primary source based research project using items from these collections. The module is designed strengthen your analytical skills and to help prepare you for the more extensive uses of primary evidence which you will encounter in final year special subjects and dissertation.
The History dissertation is a free-standing, 40-credit module that runs across both semesters of Level Three. Candidates conduct research upon a subject of their choice, devised in consultation with a member of staff teaching for the degrees in History, and concerning a topic that falls within staff research and teaching interests.
The twin issues of war and peace dominated Europe from the turn of the twentieth century. The threat of war has traditionally been presented as the result of rising national rivalries. However, this period was also one in which the world became increasingly inter-connected and modern internationalism was born, which was, in turn, seen as a guarantor of peace. This module examines how internationalist ideas evolved in the early 1900s, how they were undermined in 1914 with the outbreak of the First World War, how they were reborn again in the 1920s through the work of the League of Nations, before failing once more in the mid-to-late 1930s. The module encourages students to think critically about terms such as nationalism and internationalism and the relationship between them, as well as how war and peace have been understood and justified at different points in history.
In 1912 Ireland was an integral part of the British Empire and the Union which bound the United Kingdom together. By 1923, the island of Ireland had been partitioned, with 26 southern counties now constituting an independent Free State, while six northern counties now formed a new entity known as Northern Ireland. In the intervening years, the island of Ireland had experienced the trauma of the First World War, the shock of a nationalist rebellion in Dublin in 1916, the outbreak of a War of Independence between 1919 and 1921, and a bitter Civil War between 1922 and 1923. In the words of W.B. Yeats all was `changed, changed utterly.¿ This module will explore the political, cultural, and social changes of this period in Irish and British history. Looking at primary source accounts of the period, it will examine issues such as how the future of Ireland was imagined in 1912; different forms of nationalism and unionism; Irish involvement in the First World War; the righteousness of the Easter Rising; the role of women in political activism; the contentious events of the War of Independence and Civil War; the consequences of Irish independence for Britain and the British Empire. It will also encourage students to think about how divisive historical events should be remembered. This module will be 40% political history, 30% cultural history, and 30% social history.
This module explores the history of sex and gender across a multitude of sites since the Medieval period, examining how and why understandings and ideologies changed. This module looks at the history of sex and gender from a social and cultural perspective, drawing out connections with class and race. It explores how ideas of masculinity and femininity have changed over time, how gender has impacted on social, economic and political life, and how dominant ideologies of gender relate to the experience of men¿s and women¿s daily lives. The module will also analyse changing attitudes towards sexuality and demonstrate how modern sexual identities are the product of historical processes rather than fixed and unchanging. Students will be introduced to the key historiographical debates around the history of gender and to the core challenges that drive historians while researching these vital themes.
This Module is delivered at City University Hong Kong, for those students who participate in an Exchange Programme.
2015 - Present
January 2021
Imperial Artefacts: History, Law and the Looting of Cultural Property, Leiden University, Netherlands.
July 2020
‘Youth and Activism in Transnational Contexts, 1930s-1980s’, Northumbria University.
September 2019
Lisbon, Portugal
September 2019
University College Dublin, Ireland.
May 2019
Edinburgh University, UK.
January 2019
University of Manchester, UK.
November 2018
King’s College London, UK.
May 2018
University of Padova, Italy
March 2018
Christ Church, Oxford, UK.
March 2018
Swansea University
February 2018
International History Research Seminar, London School of Economics, UK.
November 2017
History of Education Society annual conference, Winchester, UK.
November 2016
‘Globalizing and Localising the Great War’ seminar series, Worcester College, Oxford University, UK.
July 2016
Minerva Armata Conference, Asiago, Italy.
April 2016
‘The Book and the Sword’ Workshop, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich, Germany.
April 2016
European Social Science History Conference, Valencia, Spain.
February 2016
Modern Irish History Seminar, Hertford College, University of Oxford, UK.
November 2015
History of Education Society annual conference, Liverpool Hope University, Liverpool, UK.
