History and Philosophy

I completed my PhD in History at Trinity College Dublin from which I graduated in 2005. During my time as a graduate student, I was fortunate to have my work supported by awards of a Government of Ireland Scholarship (Irish Research Council) and a bursary from the Fondation Irlandaise. I spent a considerable amount of time in France where, as well as conducting my archival research, I participated in research seminars at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris. My research – which related to the Christian Democratic peace movement in France in the aftermath of the First World War and its transnational contacts – brought me to a variety of archives and libraries in Paris, London and Rome. Appointed Lecturer in Modern European History at NUI Galway in 2005, my teaching and research interests lie in the area of modern European history. My monograph The Disarmament of Hatred: Marc Sangnier, French Catholicism and the legacy of the First World War, 1914-1945 was published with Palgrave Macmillan in 2012. In 2015, the Peace History Society awarded me the Scott Bills Memorial Prize, a biennial award which recognizes an outstanding first book in the field of peace history. I have also published articles on pacifism and on religious history in frontline journals such as European History Quarterly, the Journal of Ecclesiastical History and Parlement(s): revue d’histoire. Most recently, I have co-edited, with my colleagues Enrico Dal Lago and Róisín Healy, two volumes of essays that draw from conferences we organized at NUI Galway in the context of the centenaries of the First World War and of Ireland’s 1916 Easter Rising. Taken together, both Small Nations and Colonial Peripheries in World War One (Brill, 2016) and The Global 1916: An anti-imperial moment (Routledge, 2018) examine the transnational experience of the First World War from novel perspectives. Religious history – including the history of Catholicism- has also been an abiding theme in my research. I also serve on the advisory board of the AHRC-funded Great War and Global Religions research project, which is based at the Faculty of History, Oxford University. I am a member of the Society for First World War Studies. My on-going research interests are the history of pacifism in the interwar period and the history of reconstruction after the First World War in France and Italy. I teach modules on nineteenth- and twentieth-century European history as well as seminars or special subjects on Vichy France and on the First World War. I currently supervise a PhD student, Mr Gavan Duffy, who is researching the history of the League of Nations C Mandates, former German territories in the southern hemisphere which came under the authority of the British Dominions of South Africa, Australia and New Zealand after the First World War. As well as being the Director of Graduate Studies at the History Department I also co-ordinate the weekly Graduate Research Seminar series. I have also been a regular contributor to media including RTÉ Raidió na Gaeltachta.