Burns Visiting Scholars

Fearghal McGarry, Professor of Modern Irish history at Queen’s University Belfast was the spring 2021 Burns Visiting Scholar in Irish Studies. A member of the Royal Irish Academy, he has written or edited eleven books on Irish history. His recent research has centered on the Irish revolution and the cultural and political revival from which it emerged. His publications include The Rising (2010) and The Abbey Rebels of 1916. A Lost Revolution (2015). Earlier work, including studies of Ireland and the Spanish Civil War and biographies of Frank Ryan and Eoin O’Duffy, explored Ireland in an interwar European context.

In collaboration with colleagues at the University of Edinburgh and Boston College, Professor McGarry leads a major AHRC project, A Global History of Irish Revolution 1916-1923. Underpinned by museum exhibitions and educational resources, this research (including special issues of Irish Historical Studies and History Ireland and a forthcoming publication by NYU Press) is having a major scholarly and public impact by placing the Irish revolution within its transnational and global contexts.

A public historian and a scholar of historical memory, McGarry has been extensively engaged in the Decade of Centenaries. He worked with An Post to develop its GPO Witness History museum, and his book, Rebels: Voices from the Easter Rising (2011), was adapted for the stage by the Abbey Theatre. He is currently working with the BBC on a documentary series to mark the centenary of partition, and he is co-editing Ireland 1922, an interdisciplinary volume marking the centenary of independence, civil war and partition to be published by the Royal Irish Academy.

While at Boston College, he taught a class exploring how the Irish Free State was shaped by cultural anxieties about modernity, a topic on which he was currently writing a monograph.

For more about Fearghal and his residency at Boston College, we invite you to read his conversation with the BC Chronicle.