Trinity in War and Revolution, 1912 -1923

A New History of Trinity

The Provost, Dr Patrick Prendergast, commissioned a new history of Trinity for the period being commemorated over the next decade. Trinity in War and Revolution 1912-1923 situates the history of Trinity College Dublin within the great upheavals and changes that were taking place in Ireland and the wider world in the transformative period between 1912 and 1923. The period saw Trinity and its environs profoundly changed.

The book uses Trinity as a way of exploring some of the central themes and tensions of these years, themes that are usually examined separately: Irish involvement in the First World War; the Easter Rising of 1916; the violent struggle for Irish independence; the end of the Civil War; and the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922. It views these events through the prism of the university’s development, arguing that these contexts cannot be divorced from one another. Trinity was at the centre - physically, intellectually, symbolically - of these seismic events in local, national and international history, and each had a great impact upon the institution and its development in the twentieth century. Cumulatively, they transformed the university by 1923.

Tomás Irish is lecturer in modern history in the Department of History and Classics, Swansea University. He was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for War Studies, Trinity College Dublin, from 2012 to 2015, and was also an adjunct lecturer at Maynooth University (2015). He completed his PhD dissertation at Trinity in 2012; his research examined how academic knowledge was mobilised to solve problems that emerged during the First World War and was published in April 2015 as The University at War 1914-25: Britain, France, and the United States (Palgrave Macmillan).Trinity in War and Revolution 1912-1923 is being published by the Royal Irish Academy.