Dr Carole Holohan

She/her

Assistant Professor in Modern Irish History

Carole Holohan works on the social and cultural history of modern Ireland. Her current research focuses the history of poverty, welfare and class. She is interested in how power operates in both past societies and in history writing. She began her education in St. Mark’s Primary School in Tallaght, followed by St. Mark’s Community School and University College Dublin. She has worked in a number of institutions including the National Print Museum and Amnesty International Ireland. Prior to her arrival at Trinity, she held an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral fellowship at UCD and a teaching fellowship at DCU.

Select Publications

Monograph

Reframing Irish youth in the sixties (Liverpool University Press, 2018).

Journal Articles

(with Lindsey Earner-Byrne and Roisín Higgins), ‘Encountering modern Irish history: historiography, archives and imagination in the twenty-first century’, Irish Historical Studies, 2025, pp 1-19.
`"[W]e will bring you to a nicer place to work with more money": a reflection on work in Irish institutions.", Saothar: Journal of Irish Labour History, (50), 2025, pp190 – 201.
[with Sean O'Connell and Robert J Savage], ‘Rediscovering poverty: moneylending in the Republic of Ireland in the 1960s’, Irish Historical Studies, XLV, (168), 2021, pp 282 – 302.
‘The Second Vatican Council, poverty and Irish mentalities’, History of European Ideas, 46, (7), 2020, pp1009 – 1026.
'Conceptualising and responding to poverty in the Republic of Ireland in the 1960s: a case study of Dublin’, Social History, 41, (1), 2016, pp 34 – 53.
'Challenges to social order and Irish identity? Youth culture in the sixties', Irish Historical Studies, 38, (151), 2013, pp 389 – 405.

Book Chapters

'The Catholic Council for Social Welfare in Ireland' in Laura Lee Downs, Clarisse Berthezène, Dominika Gruziel, Efi Avdela, Dimitra Lampropoulou (eds), Mobilizing Welfare in Europe: The Unpolitical Politics of Social Action, London, Bloomsbury Academic, 2024.
'A powerful antidote? Catholic youth clubs in the sixties' in, Catherine Cox and Susannah Riordan (eds), Adolescence in Modern Irish History, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, pp176 – 198.
'John Charles McQuaid and the failure of youth sodalities, 1956-61' in Colm Lennon (ed.), Honouring God and community: confraternities and sodalities in modern Ireland , Dublin, Columba Press, 2012, pp126 – 147.
'More than a revival of memories? 1960s Youth and the 1916’ in Mary Daly and Margaret O'Callaghan (eds), 1916 in 1966: commemorating the Easter Rising, Dublin, Royal Irish Academy, 2007, pp173 – 197.

Report

In Plain Sight: Responding to the Ferns, Ryan, Murphy and Cloyne Reports, Dublin, Amnesty International Ireland, 2011, pp 1 – 436.

Teaching and Supervision

Key to Carole’s teaching philosophy is the principal that the discipline of history is strengthened by a diverse body of students studying it, and staff teaching it. She values the individual student as a person who has come to class to learn but also has much to impart. Among the modules she teaches are ones that address the history of experience, the history of poverty, class and welfare, and the history of official inquiries. She is the Director of the MPhil in Modern Irish History and supervises PhD students working on a range of social and cultural history topics.