Dr Joel Herman

Teaching Fellow in Early Modern History

My research focuses on news media, popular politics, and political transformation in Ireland, America, Britain, the British Empire, and the Atlantic world from the late seventeenth century to the Age of Revolutions. I am especially interested in the public sphere, revolutions, and empires, and the way these theoretical models, historical configurations, categories, and processes can help us make sense of the past and present.

In my published and forthcoming work, I show how the news, press, and publicity changed popular politics in the eighteenth-century British Empire and factored in the onset of an Age of Revolutions. My current book project, ‘News Revolution: The Press, Publicity, and the Destabilisation of the Eighteenth-Century British Empire’, recovers an interconnected news and information eco-system that developed from the Glorious Revolution to the American Revolution and reveals how an early mass media revolution contributed to the political revolutions, rebellions, and wars that tore apart and then remade the British Empire and Atlantic order.

I am currently co-editing a special issue of the journal Irish Historical Studies on ‘Ireland and the American Revolution’. This is part of my ongoing work on Ireland in the period of the American Revolution and broader Age of Revolutions including conferences and events organized in Dublin and Belfast, digital resources published on the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland, and collaboration with the international project AMERICA2026 to create a database of European Printed Sources on the American Revolution. Some of this work has been covered by the media, and I recently participated in the BBC documentary: Lucy Worsley Investigates: The American Revolution.

Alongside these different research, academic, and public engagement activities, I am also serving as a board member of the Eighteenth-Century Ireland Society and the co-secretary of the Irish Historical Society.

Publications

Articles and Chapters

‘The Imperial Public Sphere: Newspapers, Publicity, and the Destabilization of the Eighteenth-Century British Empire’, Historical Journal, 69 (2026), 61-84. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X2500010X
‘Elections in the News: A Transnational View of Electoral Cultures in the British Empire’, in Electoral Culture, Political Media and Popular Participation in England 1715-1832, ed. by Matthew Grenby and Elaine Chalus (Forthcoming, Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2026).
(with Peter Crooks, Timothy Murtagh, and Ciarán Wallace), ‘Courting the Past: Reconstructing Ireland’s Lost Legal Records, c.1300–1922’, in Law and Constitutional Change: Essays on Legal History, ed. by David Capper, Conor McCormick, and Norma Dawson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025).
‘Transnational News and the Imperial Crisis, c.1760-1780’, in Exciting News: Event, Narration, and Impact from Past to Present, ed. by Brendan Dooley and Alexander Samuel Wilkinson (Leiden: Brill, 2024), 242-260.
‘A Political Turn of the Irish Newspaper, c.1760-1770’, in Speculative Minds in Georgian Dublin, 1760-1850, ed. by Toby Barnard and Alison Fitzgerald (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2023), 91-106.
‘Imagined Nations: Newspapers, Identity, and the Free Trade Crisis of 1779’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland/Iris an dá chultúr, 35 (2020), 51-69.

Essays and Media Publications

‘A News Revolution?: The Imperial Public Sphere and the Destabilization of the British Empire’, Cambridge Core Blog (September, 2025).
‘The Story of 250 Years of Connections between Ireland and the US’, RTE Brainstorm (November, 2024).
‘Recovering the Lost Debates and Speeches of Grattan’s Parliament’, Archive Fever (June, 2024).
‘The Power to Bind: Molyneux’s Case and the Imperial Constitution in the Eighteenth-Century British Empire’, Universal Short Title Catalogue Blog (November, 2023).
‘Transnational News and the Irish Free Trade Crisis’, Age of Revolutions (February, 2021).
‘Imagined Communities in an Age of Global Pandemic’, London School of Economics and Political Science International History Blog (May, 2020).

Selected Digital Publications

Teaching

My teaching areas include the cultural and political history of Ireland, America, and Britain from the Early Modern Period to the Age of Revolutions: print culture, news media, the public sphere, revolutions, empires, popular politics, and political change. I currently offer modules on the ‘American Revolution: The Causes, Consequences, and Meanings of Independence’ and ‘How the News Made the Early/Modern World’. I also contribute to the MPhil in Early Modern History offering seminars on print culture, popular politics, and revolutions as part of the core module: ‘Reading Early Modern History’.