Trinity College Dublin, The University of Dublin

Gerard Farrell

Gerard Farrell is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of History working on the Empire project. He has a broad field of interests related to seventeenth-century Ireland and colonialism more generally, particularly its impact on indigenous populations. Having graduated with a BA in History and English in 2011, he received his PhD in History from Trinity College in 2015. He is the author of The ‘Mere Irish’ and the Colonisation of Ulster, 1570-1641 (2017), an in-depth study of the impact on the native Irish population of the plantations in Ulster. Following his PhD, he was the Royal Irish Academy’s RJ Hunter postdoctural fellow from 2016 to 2018.

His interest in early-modern colonialism extends to other areas of the Atlantic world, particularly North America and the indigenous people of the eastern seaboard as the met the challenges of conquest and colonisation in the seventeenth century, a subject on which he taught a course at Trinity College in the Spring of 2018. Beyond the early-modern period, he has an interest in the transmission of historical evidence more broadly, and is a qualified archivist, having completed a masters in Archival Science at Uppsala University in 2019-2021, writing his thesis on The Vienna Convention of 1983: context, failure and aftermath. He is also an Irish-language enthusiast, with a particular interest in the evolution of Irish literature since the early-modern period, and in 2023 produced the first Transkribus model for automated transcription of seanchló/cló Gaelach, or Gaelic type.

ORCID: 0000-0002-6389-5943

Publications

Books

The ‘Mere Irish’ and the Colonisation of Ulster, 1570-1641(Cham, 2017).

Book Chapters

‘The Irish presence in seventeenth century urban Ulster’, in Brendan Scott (ed.), Society and administration in the Ulster Plantation towns 1610–89, (Dublin, 2019), pp. 117-133.

Journal Articles

‘Handwritten text recognition and Large Language Model processing of sources from New Sweden’ in Manuscript Studies: A Journal of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies. Vol.12 (Philadelphia, 2026).

‘Automatiserad texttolkning och bearbetning med stora språkmodeller: Källor från Nya Sverige’ in Scandia : Tidskrift för historisk forskning. Vol 92 (Lund, 2026).

‘The Irish and the economy of plantation Ulster’, in Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy Vol. 122C, (Dublin, 2022), pp. 169-202.
‘Class divisions and the 'mere Irish' of colonial Ulster’, in Journal of Postgraduate Research, (Dublin, 2014), pp. 73-91.