About
After completing a BA and MA in History at University College Dublin, I was awarded the British and Irish Governments Scholarship at the University of Liverpool, where I completed my doctorate. I am Professor of Public History Liverpool John Moores University, where I am the Programme Leader for the MA in Modern History and teach on undergraduate and postgraduate courses. I am member of the Board of the Irish Museums Association, a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a former Fulbright Scholar.
For as long as I can remember I have been fascinated by the past and over the course of my career this fascination has led me to explore a wide range of subjects, from 19th-century Irish radical republicanism to the contemporary museum and heritage industry, where I work as a freelance consultant. My interests crystallise around recurring themes: the darker corners of history - and the ways in which dramatic events are remembered and misremembered - the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, and how those stories evolve according to competing interests and needs.
My interest in newspaper history led me to Chicago, where I discovered a forgotten murder trial that rocked 19th-century Irish America and made newspaper headlines around the world. In 2009 I returned to Chicago and the Newberry Library as a Fulbright Scholar to explore the story further, and the resulting book, Blood Runs Green (University of Chicago Press) was published in 2015.
Chicago - home of the skyscraper - has one of the most striking skylines of any city I know, and my experiences there led me to develop my interest in architecture and urban history. I am co-editor with Finola O’Kane of Georgian Dublin (2008) and Portraits of the City: Dublin and the Wider World (2012). I am collaborating with architectural historian Jessie Castle on an ongoing project to map and document the surviving convents of the Presentation Sisters in Ireland, uncovering new evidence of female agency in a world dominated by men. My interest in convent architecture is tied to my research on the history of primary education in Ireland in the nineteenth century which I worked on with Garret FitzGerald and which was published by the Royal Irish Academy in 2013.
The murder that lies at the heart of Blood Runs Green fed the public's appetite for the gory and the gruesome, both in print and in reality, as Chicago's 'dime museums' competed with each other to exhibit relics associated with the murder, not all of them genuine. This fascination with the macabre has evolved, over the last century or so, into what today is known as 'dark tourism', the visiting of sites associated with misery, suffering and death, and it's this fascination that forms the focus of my new book, The Darkness Echoing: Exploring Ireland’s Places of Famine, Death & Rebellion. The book brings together all my research interests and combines them with my heritage and museum work to examine how some (hi)stories are created, developed and maintained over time while others are hidden and ignored.