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Emeritus Fellows

Professor Ronald J Hill

BA, MA, MA, PhD, SFTCD

Ron Hill with Professor Jerzy Wiatr, doyen of Poland's social scientists, November 2011

Professor Ron Hill, long regarded as one of the world's leading experts on communist politics, retired in September 2007 after 38 years in the department. He has remained active in retirement, and recently published a childhood memoir, Grammar School Boy: A Lincolnshire Education. In 2016, thanks to generous donations from alumni, the Ronald J Hill Prize for outstanding performance in Scholarship examinations was inaugurated. A brief summary of his work is outlined below:

Current status
  • Professor Hill retired as Professor of Comparative Government in September 2007, a position to which he was appointed in 1991
Research Interests
  • Russian, Soviet, East and Central European politics
Teaching Interests
  • Russian society and politics
  • East European politics
Previous Appointments and Distinctions
  • Junior Lecturer, Lecturer, Associate Professor of Political Science
  • Senior Associate Member, St. Antony's College, Oxford (1979)
  • Visiting Fullbright Professor, Lafayette College, Easton, PA (1981-82)
  • Associate of Institute for Soviet and East European Studies, University of Glasgow (1988)
  • Fellow-in-Residence, Netherlands Institute of Advanced Studies
Editorships
  • General Editor, Studies of Communism in Transition (Edward Elgar Publishers)
  • Style and Managing Editor, Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics
  • Editor, Irish Slavonic Studies
  • General Editor, ICCEES Warsaw Congress Proceedings (Macmillan Publishing)
Editorial Boards
  • Russian Government and Law
Books
  • Soviet Political Elites: The Case of Tiraspol (London: Martin Robertson and New York: St. Martin's Press, 1977)
  • Soviet Politics, Political Science and Reform (Oxford: Martin Robertson and Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1980)
  • The Soviet Communist Party (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981; 3rd edn 1986; co-author)
  • The Soviet Union: Politics, Economics and Society (London: Pinter, 1985; 2nd edn. 1989)
  • Communist Politics Under the Knife: Surgery or Autopsy? (London: Pinter, 1990)
  • Gorbachev and Perestroika: Towards a New Socialism? (Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1990; co-editor)
  • Beyond Stalinism: Communist Political Evolution (London: Cass, 1992; editor)
  • Modern Irish Democracy: Essays in Honour of Basil Chubb (Blackrock: Irish Academic Press, 1993; co-editor)
  • Putin and Putinism (London: Routledge, 2009; co-editor)
Articles, Book Chapters, and Reviews
  • More than 80 published articles and chapters on various aspects of politics; his latest scholarly publication, on referendums in the former communist world, appeared in early 2014.
History

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Professor Patrick Keatinge

BA, MSc, PhD, MRIA, emeritus FTCD

Professor Neil Patrick Keatinge is Emeritus Associate Professor of Political Science at TCD. He graduated from Trinity in 1960 and completed a Masters in International Relations at the London School of Economics before returning to TCD as a Junior Lecturer in 1963. His PhD thesis, entitled 'The Formulation of Irish Foreign Policy', was completed in the department in 1968 and later became the basis for his first book. He was appointed Associate Professor in 1979, and held the chair of Jean Monnet Professor of European Integration from 1992 (in which year he was also elected a Member of the Royal Irish Academy) until his retirement in 1999. View more information regarding the history of the Department.

During his time in Trinity, Patrick Keatinge became established as Ireland's leading expert on international relations, European security and Irish foreign policy. His second of many books, A Place Among the Nations: Issues of Irish Foreign Policy (1978), was the first study by a political scientist of Ireland's role in international affairs. He continued to analyse and chronicle Ireland's emerging international role throughout his career, a subject for which his works remain the standard academic reference. Professor Keatinge turned his attention to Ireland's neutrality in the context of European security in his book A Singular Stance: Irish Neutrality in the 1980s (1984), which established his reputation beyond these shores as an expert on European neutrals. He returned to this theme in the context of the post-Cold War world in his book European Security: Ireland's Choices (1996), where he identifies and evaluates the options available to Ireland in this new era.

He was also an outstanding teacher, and generations of undergraduates would be able to testify to his ability to make the education process both entertaining and intellectually stimulating. He was equally active at postgraduate level, supervising no fewer than eight doctoral theses to completion: approximately the same number as the rest of the department put together over the same period. These included the doctoral thesis of Robert Fisk, who is now described in his Wikipedia entry as 'the world's most decorated foreign correspondent'.

Outside Trinity, Patrick Keatinge actively promoted the study of international and European affairs in Ireland. He was a founder-member of the Royal Irish Academy's National Committee for the Study of International Affairs, the Irish Committee for Contemporary European Studies, and the Institute of European Affairs (IEA). He was Senior Research Fellow at the IEA from 1993 to 1996, where he conducted research on a wide range of issues relating to Ireland's membership of the European Union.

His retirement from TCD was marked by the publication of a volume of essays entitled Ireland in international affairs - interests, institutions and identities: Essays in honour of Professor N. P. Keatinge, edited by two of his former doctoral students, Ben Tonra and Eilís Ward (Dublin: Institute of Public Administration, 2002). The volume, as accurately stated on the cover of the book, is a tribute to the person who, 'more than any other, established the discipline of international relations in Irish academia'. In 2013, thanks to generous donations from alumni, the Patrick Keatinge Prize for outstanding performance in final year was first awarded.

He remains active in retirement and is contactable (by surface mail only) at

Professor Patrick Keatinge, Department of Political Science, Trinity College Dublin, 2-3 College Green, Dublin 2, Ireland

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