Professor Fearghal McGarry specialises in modern Irish history. He is currently writing a book on inter-war anxieties about modernity.

His early publications, including studies of Ireland and the Spanish Civil War, the socialist republican Frank Ryan, and the fascist Eoin O'Duffy, explored inter-war Irish radicalism in a European context.

More recently he has written on the revolutionary period, including a history of the Easter Rising, and a collective biography of seven rebels associated with the Abbey Theatre. He also works on Irish republicanism and political violence.

Fearghal is interested in public history including historical memory; commemoration; film; and documentaries. He co-edited Ireland 1922: Independence, Partition, Civil War, published by the Royal Irish Academy to mark the centenary of independence, and a special journal issue on Ireland's Decade of Commemorations.

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

He has served as joint editor of Irish Historical Studies and a member of the editorial board of Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. He is a series editor for Irish Historical Monographs. He has worked as a consultant for public history projects, including the development of An Post's GPO Witness History museum, and has contributed to 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 project and the Making the Future cultural heritage project. He is a member of the Expert Advisory Panel for the National Museum of Ireland's 20th Century History of Ireland Galleries, the first permanent exhibition on the history of modern Ireland,  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 Fearghal McGarry 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 Theory in History
• MHY7025 Presenting Sources
• MHY7081 Topics in Irish History
• MHY7010 Modern History Dissertation

Prof McGarry welcomes PhD applications on twentieth-century Irish history. He has supervised dissertations on female republican experiences of imprisonment, 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 Tyrone.