Books & Articles
Books
My latest book The Shortest History of Dublin was published in Australia at the beginning of October 2026 (it will be out in Ireland and the UK in Spring 2027 and the US in Summer 2027)
It is in many ways the culmination of two decades of reading, research, walking, talking and watching!
Dublin has never been a place easily reduced to a single story. Developed as a Viking settlement, it became the difficult second city of the British Empire – a colonial capital that served empire rather than nation. For centuries it strained to rival London; later it struggled to define itself apart from it. Yet today it stands as an increasingly multicultural global city with a rich literary past.
The Shortest History of Dublin explores that restless inheritance – the ways in which Dublin remembers, forgets and remakes itself. It shows how Dublin's truest identity endures in the words of its greatest writers, from the likes of Joyce and Yeats to modern authors Roddy Doyle, Anne Enright, Sebastian Barry and Sally Rooney. And that the challenge of this city of music, writing, architecture and craic is to balance change with character, growth with memory.
The book can be bought here: The Shortest History of Dublin
The Darkness Echoing
Inspired by a grandmother who liked to try on outfits for her funeral, Gillian O’Brien has long been fascinated by the macabre. In The Darkness Echoing, she tours Ireland’s most deliciously dark heritage sites, delving into the stories behind them and asking what they reveal about the Irish.
From war to revolution, famine to emigration and, finally, to death and ghosts, O’Brien explores the strange allure of Ireland’s troubled history. Energetic, illuminating and surprisingly funny, The Darkness Echoing challenges old, accepted narratives about Ireland, and asks intriguing questions about Ireland’s past, present and future.
Blood Runs Green
Blood Runs Green tells the story of Patrick Cronin’s murder in Chicago in 1880. It is a story of hotheaded journalists in pursuit of sensational crimes, of a bungling police force riddled with informers and spies, and of a secret revolutionary society determined to free Ireland but succeeding only in tearing itself apart.
Edited Collections, Articles, & Chapters
Select Publications
‘Ships, Sugar and Slavery: Catholics, Provisioning, and Eighteenth-Century Cork’ in Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 38, (2023)
The Darkness Echoing, Exploring Ireland’s Places of Famine, Death & Rebellion (Doubleday, 2020) Paperback, Penguin, 2023
Blood Runs Green: The Murder that Transfixed Gilded Age Chicago, (Chicago University Press, 2015)
Editor (with Finola O’Kane), Portraits of the City: Dublin and the Wider World (Four Courts Press, 2012)
Editor (with Finola O’Kane), Georgian Dublin (Four Courts Press, 2008)
‘The 1825-6 Commissioners of Irish Education Reports: Background and Context in Garret FitzGerald, Primary Education in Ireland, (Royal Irish Academy, 2013)
‘“Readiness and Range” Margaret Sullivan: Irish Nationalist, American Journalist’ in Debra Reddin van Tuyll, Mark O’Brien, Marcel Broersma (eds) Politics, Culture and the Irish American Press, (Syracuse University Press, 2020)
‘Methodology and Martyrs: Irish American Republicanism in the late-nineteenth century’ in Peter Herman (ed.) Critical Concepts: Terrorism, (Cambridge University Press, 2018)
‘“I am building a house” Nano Nagle’s Georgian Convents’ (with Jessie Castle) in Irish Architectural and Decorative Studies, vol IX, 2017, 54-75
‘Revolution, Rebellion and the Viceroyalty, 1789-99’ in Peter Gray & Olwen Purdue (eds), The Irish Lord Lieutenancy (UCD Press, 2012), 114-31
‘Patriotism, Professionalism and the Press: The Chicago Press & Irish Journalists, 1875-1900’ in Kevin Rafter (ed.), ‘Not so much a profession as a disease’ Irish Journalism: A Historical Anthology (Manchester University Press, 2011), 120-34
‘The Future of the Past’ in Lorcan Sirr (ed.) Dublin’s Future – New Visions on Ireland’s Capital City’ (Liffey Press, 2011), 209-25
‘“Ireland must be our province if she will not be persuaded to a Union”: British policy in Ireland 1795-98’, in Dáire Keogh & Kevin Whelan (eds), Acts of Union (Four Courts Press, 2001), 106-25