Professor Ciaran Brady

Professor

Research Interests

My research interests have developed along two different but for me closely related lines. First, as an early modernist by training, I continue to research and write on Irish and English history in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Within this field I have a particular interest in the relations between the Gaelic Irish lordships and the English government and in the way the latter sought to engage with the former in terms both of practical policy and theoretical understanding. I am currently at work on the preparation of a Calendar of State Papers for the years 1556-65. My awareness of the unresolved interpretative conflicts which surround early modern Irish history and Anglo-Irish relations stimulated my second research interest in the theory and practice of history writing. I have published several articles and edited a number of books in this area and I have recently completed a study of the Victorian man-of letters and historian of the sixteenth century, James Anthony Froude.

Select Publications
Books

• British Interventions in Early Modern Ireland (Ed., with Jane Ohlmeyer; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. xx + 371.
• A Viceroy’s Vindication? Sir Henry Sidney’s Memoir of Service in Ireland, 1556-1578 (Ed.;Cork: Cork University Press, 2002), pp. vi + 136.
• Shane O'Neill (Dundalk: Dundalgan Press, 1996), pp. 76.
• Interpreting Irish history: The debate on historical revisionism, 1938-1994 (Ed., Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1994), pp. 348.
• The Chief Governors: The rise and fall of reform government in Tudor Ireland, 1536-1588 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. xviii + 322.
• Ideology and the Historians (Ed., Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1991), pp. ix + 273.

Articles

• ‘Arrested development: competing histories and the formation of the Irish historical profession, 1801-1938’, in Tibor Frank and Frank Hadler (eds), Disputed Territories and Shared Pasts: Overlapping national histories in modern Europe (Basingstoke, 2011), pp. 275-302.
• ‘From policy to power : the evolution of Tudor reform strategies in sixteenth-century Ireland’, in Brian MacCuarta (ed), Reshaping Ireland, 1550-1700: Colonization and its consequences. Essays presented to Nicholas Canny (Dublin, 2011), pp. 21-42.
• ‘Spenser, plantation and government policy’, in R.A. Mc Cabe (ed), The Oxford Handbook of Edmund Spenser (Oxford, 2010), pp. 86-105.
• ‘Pitying the plumage: commemorating the "flight of the earls" in contemporary and historical contexts’, in Mary Ann Lyons and Thomas  O'Connor  (eds), The Ulster Earls and Baroque Europe: Refashioning Irish identities, 1600-1800 (Dublin, 2010), pp. 362-79.
• ‘Destinies intertwined: the metaphysical unionism of James Anthony Froude’, in Séamus Ó Síocháin (ed.), Social Thought on Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (Dublin, 2010), pp. 108-34.

Teaching and Supervision

My teaching closely follows my research interests. At undergraduate level I teach Sophister [level 3 and 4] modules on sixteenth-century cultural history, ‘The Elizabethans and their World’ and ‘History-writing in nineteenth century Britain and Ireland’. At Freshman level I participate in two modules on early modern Irish history, two modules on American history, and a module on early modern British history. At postgraduate level I participate in the History Department’s M.Phil programmes in Early Modern History and Modern Irish History – and I co-ordinate the module ‘Contesting Histories’, shared also with the M.Phil in Public History. I am happy to offer supervision for research degrees on topics related sixteenth-century Ireland and England and on nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and Irish history-writing.

Professor Brady on the TCD Research Support System

Contact Details

Room 3116
Department of History
Trinity College
Dublin 2.

Telephone: +353 1 896 1578
Fax: +353 1 896 3995
Email: cbrady@tcd.ie