Professor David Dickson

Professor

Research Interests

My research interests lie along three lines that have at times crossed but have mostly remained distinct: the agrarian history of Ireland and its regions between 1650 and 1850; the social evolution of Dublin city over the long run; and the emigration of human capital from Ireland to the English-speaking world, specifically the global dispersal of Irish graduates and trainee missionaries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Reflecting these three sets of interest, I am joint investigator on a project tracking the movement of Irish agricultural rents between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth century; I am currently completing a general history of the city of Dublin between 1500 and 2000; and I am co-editing a volume, Irish classrooms and British empire: Imperial contexts in the origins of modern education, derived from the IRCHSS-funded ‘Ireland, Education and Empire’ Project of which I have been Principal Investigator.

Select Publications
Books

• Old World Colony: Cork and south Munster, 1630-1830 (Cork and Madison: Cork UP & Wisconsin UP, 2005), pp. 726.
• Refiguring Ireland: Essays in honour of L.M. Cullen (Ed. with Cormac Ó Gráda; Dublin: Lilliput, 2003)
• 1798: A bicentenary perspective (Ed. with Thomas Bartlett, Daire Keogh & Kevin Whelan; Dublin: Four Courts, 2003), pp. xii + 756.
• New foundations: Ireland 1660-1800 (2nd rev. edn, Dublin: Irish Academic, 2000), pp. xvi + 248.

Articles

• ‘The state of Dublin’s history’, in Eire-Ireland, XlV, 1-2 (2010), pp. 198-212
• ‘City, seasons and society’, in John Crowley, Robert Devoy, Denis Linehan & Patrick O’Flanagan, eds, Atlas of Cork City (Cork: Cork UP, 2005), pp. 127-34.
• ‘Death of a capital? Dublin and the consequences of Union’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 107 (2001), pp. 111-31.

Teaching and Supervision

My Freshman (level 2) teaching focuses on Ireland and the wider world between 1660 and 1815, and I offer a Sophister List III [Honors] module on eighteenth-century Dublin. My List I module is on Sub-Saharan Africa 1870-2000. I also contribute to modules on the M.Phil. programmes on Modern Irish History and on Public History & Cultural Heritage, the latter of which I co-ordinate. I supervise doctoral research projects on a variety of Irish social, cultural and economic history topics.

Professor Dickson on the TCD Research Support System

Contact Details

Room 3112
Department of History
Trinity College
Dublin 2.

Telephone: +353 1 896 1884
Fax: +353 1 896 3995
Email: ddickson@tcd.ie