We asked what repairing the harm of enslavement would look like. This is what we found Our Legacies of Enslavement team has found humanity and dignity, not blame or guilt, are at the heart of the conversation

www.theguardian.com/news/ng-inte...

www.tcd.ie/trinitylongr...

One of a number of *fully-funded* PhD studentships associated with our new Leverhulme Centre for Research on Slavery and War. I'll be co-supervising with the Centre director, Maeve Ryan: an interdisciplinary collaboration with War Studies. PlHappy to answer questions/offer advice!

🗃️#EarlyModern

That’s fascinating, thank you. Will pass it on

The long but largely forgotten history of Irish seaweed disputes Current controversies over access to Irish seaweed are a reminder that such disputes are a vivid part of Ireland's colonial past

Great new piece on RTE Brainstorm by my @historytcd.bsky.social PhD student Ciana Devitt on long colonial history of seaweed extraction in Ireland and It’s contemporary resonances www.rte.ie/brainstorm/2...

French man, 86, issues historic apology for family’s role in transatlantic slavery Pierre Guillon de Prince believed to be first in France to formally apologise for ancestors’ connections to slavery

'Guillon de Prince said on Saturday that other French families must confront their historical allegiances to slavery and the state should go beyond symbolic gestures to address the past, including through reparations.'

I have been thinking about these issues in relation to the legacies of the vast TCD estates and the tenants whose labour funded the university campus drb.ie/blog/tcds-fo... and Joe they might be memorialised

Extract from Irish times on colonial and class legacies at Kylemore Abbey

Struck by the framing of the article in terms of rethinking the class relations embedded in historic houses. These were colonial but also fundamentally class based relationships between landed capital and peasant/servant labour

Kylemore Abbey ‘honours legacy’ of estate labourers with restored bothy and tool shed Benedictine nuns help to reclaim history of Connemara site built in ‘country still reeling’ from Famine

This a very interesting colonial legacy story with wider implications for how we think about the labour that cultivated Irish landed estates and build Irish country houses: Kylemore Abbey ‘honours legacy’ of estate labourers with restored bothy and tool shed

www.irishtimes.com/ireland/2026...

Not entirely convinced either by his argument for lack of continuity from colonial confiscations through to nineteenth century. Needs a rather benign view of ‘improvement’ and whiteboyism but you know this!

Book: vanished: an unnatural history of extinction

Just finished this excellent book by @sadiahqureshi.bsky.social Vanished: An Unnatural History of Extinction. My dodo obsessed sons were drawn in by the cover but there is so much here including a brilliant chapter on the eccentric Irish-Australian anthropologist Daisy Bates

The long but largely forgotten history of Irish seaweed disputes Current controversies over access to Irish seaweed are a reminder that such disputes are a vivid part of Ireland's colonial past

Great new piece on RTE Brainstorm by my @historytcd.bsky.social PhD student Ciana Devitt on long colonial history of seaweed extraction in Ireland and It’s contemporary resonances www.rte.ie/brainstorm/2...

Really great to have this. Have enjoyed listening to lively provocations from Sean Connolly in response to @marcmulholland.bsky.social’s book.

Universities: researching and working not just for you but for us, and stronger when collaborating rather than competing.

This is awful news

An image shoeing the cover of a new book, Seeing Ireland: Art, Culture, and Power in Modern Ireland (UND Press, 2026), with a blurb quote by Diarmuid Ó Giolláin calling it a 'highly original contribution to the study of Irish Art.'

Today is publication day for this beautiful book. Inspiration for it came from seeing @billyshortall.bsky.social talk about his brilliant PhD research at the IHSA in @tlrhub.bsky.social in 2017. One of those joyful collaborations that come along sometimes in academia. Cover is a Paul Henry painting

Full-funded (home or international) collaborative PhD studentship (Kew and Royal Holloway, University of London) available. Deadline 8 May.

Topic: ‘Just acquisitions? Law and ethics over time in Kew’s overseas plant collecting history’ #Skystorians

Not to mention all those plantations…

Ha! It’s my favourite module. I teach as 18thC Ireland as an Atlantic Island connecting in themes of trade, commodities (beef, linen, cod) migration, capitalism, as well as links to other Atlantic islands from Newfoundland to Caribbean islands.

It’s not for nothing that my students on my Atlantic Island module call their WhatsApp group ‘salt beef’ 🐄

This is excellent and worth remembering long roots of export driven Irish agrarian capitalism. Goes back to 18th Century ‘provisions’ trade connecting Munster grasslands to Caribbean and North America. Then as now inequality at home shaped inequality abroad in world shaped by extractive capitalism.

I'm delighted to say we have opened our visiting fellowship scheme in the College of Arts, Social Sciences & Celtic Studies @uniofgalway.bsky.social. Deadline for applications is 1 May 2026. All visits must take place in the period May to Sept 2026.
www.universityofgalway.ie/colleges-and...

Conor McCabe: Protesters' grievances are real — they're bearing a heavy load Responsibility for the time-sensitive targets at the heart of national policy is carried by agricultural contractors who are struggling to make repayments on loans for the necessary heavy machinery, a...

This is very good from Conor McCabe and one of the few piece's of analysis I have read that clearly links the fuel protests with Ireland's deeply unequal and dysfunctional grass-fed agricultural system.

www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/comm...

Letter from Irish times on Irish language as ecological issue by Gabriel Rosenstock

Really beautiful expression of why fostering the Irish language is an ecological rather than a political issue in this old letter from the late poet Gabriel Rosenstock in today’s Irish Times.

🔔⏰Just over 1 month to go! ⏰🔔

Call for papers: Modern British History and the 'Environmental Turn'

A two-day workshop organised by
@andrewseaton.bsky.social and myself at Lincoln College, Oxford, 16-17 September. Deadline for abstracts is 15 May.

Details in poster below!

This looks like a fascinating exhibition in the @nmireland.bsky.social on a remarkable 19th century story

Power and Powerlessness in Union Ireland: Life in a Palliative State Published in The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History (Ahead of Print, 2026)

New book review published advance access by @jich.bsky.social

Scott Denis McCarthy reviews 'Power and Powerlessness in Union Ireland: Life in a Palliative State' by Ciaran O’Neill

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Mannie the 100ft statue to the duke of Sutherland

Discovered this amazing monument ‘Mannie’ to the Duke of Sutherland responsible for highland clearances. A 100 ft monument to a 19th century landlord. Must visit him sometime mikeonthemovedotblog.wordpress.com/wp-content/u...

Continued my reading into bogs finishing Donald Murray’s The Dark Stuff. Really good on bogs and moors as marginal places but also on various schemes to make unprofitable acres profitable from Todd Andrews and Bord na Mona to Dutch ‘welfare’ institutions to highland clearances.

‘Immigrants could be found in every corner of the Irish Free State….the 1920s were quite a globalised world’. (John Gibney)