Professor David Fitzpatrick

Professor of Modern History

Research Interests

My research has ranged over many aspects of Irish political, economic, social, demographic, and literary history from the late eighteenth- to the mid-twentieth century, with particular focus on the Irish revolution (1916-23) and international migration (which has led me to work on relevant aspects of British and Australian history). I am currently writing a history of the Orange Order in Ireland, and have investigated the concealed effects of a partly Orange background on writers such as Yeats and MacNeice.

Select Publications
Books

• The Orange: Protestant brotherhood in Ireland since 1795 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, forthcoming 2013).
• Solitary and Wild: Frederick MacNeice and the salvation of Ireland (Dublin: Lilliput Press, forthcoming 2011).  
• Harry Boland’s Irish Revolution (Cork: Cork UP, 2003), pp. xii + 450.
• The Two Irelands, 1912-1939 (Oxford: OUP, 1998), pp. xvi + 301.
• Oceans of Consolation: Personal accounts of Irish migration to Australia (Ithaca: Cornell UP; Cork: Cork UP; Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 1995), pp. xiv + 649.
• Irish Emigration 1801–1921 (Irish Econ. & Soc.l Hist. Soc., 1984; enlarged edn, 1989), pp. 53.
• Politics and Irish Life, 1913–21: Provincial experience of war and revolution (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1977; slightly enlarged edn, 1998), pp. xxii + 394.

Articles

• ‘Yeats and Sligo’, in Ben Levitas and David Holdeman, eds, Yeats in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010), pp 69-79.
• ‘”I will acquire an attitude not yours”: was Frederick MacNeice a home ruler, and why does this matter?’, Field Day Review, 4 (2008), pp. 147-62.
• ‘Une histoire tres catholique? Révisionnisme et orthodoxie dans l’historiographie irlandaise’, Vingtième Siecle: Revue d’Histoire, 94 (2007), pp. 121-33.
• ‘Exporting Brotherhood: Orangeism in South Australia’, in Enda Delaney and D.M. MacRaild, eds, Migrant Networks and Irish Ethnic Identities since 1750 (special issue of Immigrants and Minorities, 23 (2005), pp. 277-310.
• ‘Commemoration in the Irish Free State: a chronicle of embarrassment’, in Ian McBride and George Boyce, eds, History and Memory in Modern Ireland, (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001), pp. 184-203.
• ‘Ireland, 1801-1914’, in Andrew Porter, ed., Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. iii (Oxford: OUP, 1999), pp. 494-521.
• ‘Irish emigration, 1870-1921’ and ‘The Irish in Britain, 1870-1921, in W.E. Vaughan, ed., A New History of Ireland, vol. vi (Oxford: OUP, 1996), pp. 606-52, 653-702
• ‘Famine, seduction, and entitlements: Captain Edmond Wynne in Ireland, 1846-51’, English Historical Review, 110 (1995), pp. 596-619.
• ‘The logic of collective sacrifice: Ireland and the British Army, 1914-1918’, Historical Journal, 38 (1995), pp. 1017-30.
• ‘Irish emigration, 1801-70’ and ‘“A peculiar tramping people”: the Irish in Britain, l80l-70’, in W.E. Vaughan, ed., A New History of Ireland, vol. v (Oxford: OUP, 1989), pp. 562-622, 623-60.
• ‘Divorce and separation in modern Irish history’, Past and Present, 114 (1987), pp. 172-96.
• ‘“A share of the honeycomb”: education, emigration and Irishwomen’, Continuity and Change, 1 (1986), pp. 217-34.
• ‘The disappearance of the Irish agricultural labourer, 1841-1912’, Irish Economic and Social History, 7 (1986), pp. 66-92.
• ‘Irish emigration in the later nineteenth century’, Irish Historical Studies, 22(86) (1980), pp. 126-43.
• ‘The geography of Irish nationalism 1910–21’, Past and Present, 78 (1978), pp. 113-44.

Teaching and Supervision

Since 1979 I have taught nine special subjects to Sophisters [third and fourth year students] at Trinity College, relating to various aspects of Irish history from 1914 to 1923 and Irish emigration, family, women, fraternity, and literature and politics. In 1985 I established the Trinity History Workshop, which has since generated several widely reviewed books of student essays, including two relating to Ireland from 1914 to 1923. (A third will appear in November 2011). I have supervised numerous doctoral theses, of which nine have so far been published as books, in addition to masters’ theses and undergraduate dissertations (mainly ‘editorial projects’ based on annotated documents). I contribute to teaching on the M.Phil in Modern Irish History as well as to survey modules for Senior Freshmen [second year undergraduates] on Ireland since 1800 and more specialist Sophister modules. I have participated in various courses while visiting universities in Canada and Australia.

Professor Fitzpatrick on the TCD Research Support System

Contact Details

Room 3121
Department of History
Trinity College
Dublin 2.

Telephone: +353 1 896 1595
Fax: +353 1 896 3995
Email: dftzptrk@tcd.ie