Fearghal McGarry joined Queen's University in 2002. Prior to that he studied history at University College Dublin and at Trinity College Dublin, where he lectured for several years, before taking up a Governement of Ireland research fellowship at NUI Maynooth.

He was joint editor of Irish Historical Studies and a member of the editorial board of Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. He has worked as a consultant on numerous public history projects, including the development of An Post's GPO Witness History museum, and documentaries by BBC, RTE and TG4.

He was a member of advisory or steering groups for the Ulster Museum's Collecting the Troubles and Beyond (2015-18) project and the Making the Future cultural heritage project (2028-21). He is a member of the Expert Advisory Panel for the National Museum of Ireland's 20th Century History of Ireland Galleries, and is on the advisory group of the Military Service Pensions collection project. He was elected a member of the Royal Irish Academy in 2019.

Prof McGarry works mainly on modern Ireland. Earlier publications, including studies of Ireland and the Spanish Civil War, the socialist republican Frank Ryan, and the fascist Eoin O'Duffy, explored interwar Irish radicalism in a European context. He has written widely on Irish republicanism and political violence. More recent research has focused on the revolutionary period. He has written widely on the Easter Rising, most recently a collective biography of seven rebels associated with the Abbey Theatre. He is interested in how the past is represented, including through historical memory and commemoration; film, documentary and theatre; and museums. He co-edited the major commemorative study, Ireland 1922: Independence, Partition, Civil War recently published by the Royal Irish Academy.

He is currently writing a book assessing Irish anxieties about modernity in an interwar European context, and is working with Midas Productions and the National Archives of Ireland to develop a two-part RTE documentary on this subject.

He led two AHRC projects on film and history (2011-14) and was PI of the AHRC-funded project, A Global History of Irish Revolution (2017-2021) which assesses how global factors shaped the independence struggle in Ireland. His co-edited volume, The Irish Revolution: A Global History, was recently published by New York University Press.

Prof Fearghal McGarry currently teaches on the following programmes/modules:

Undergraduate 

• HIS3109 Age of Anxiety
• HIS3073 The Irish Revolution, 1917-1921
• HIS2012 Politics and Society in 20th c. Ireland

Postgraduate

• MHY7035 History and Theory
• MHY7025 Presenting Sources
• MHY7081 Topics in Irish History
• MHY7010 Modern History Dissertation

Prof McGarry welcomes PhD applications in modern Irish cultural and political history. He has supervised dissertations on the afterlife of Michael Collins, censorship and propaganda in Northern Ireland, museum representations of the Troubles, the Irish border, political conflict in East Ulster, labour in Belfast, the Blueshirts, Irish communism, the Sunningdale power-sharing administration, and republicanism in east Tyrone.