Sean Connolly

Sean Connolly has been Professor of Irish History at Queen’s University, Belfast, since 1996.  He had previously taught at the University of Ulster, and before that worked as an archivist in what was then the Public Record Office (now the National Archives) of Ireland.  He was editor of the journal Irish Economic and Social History  from 1982 to 1990, and again from 2000 to 2012.  He was elected a member of the Royal Irish Academy in 1995, and in 2016 became a Fellow of the British Academy.  He is also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, where he served on Council during 2007-10 and is currently a vice-president.  In 2012 he was a Fernand Braudel Research Fellow at the European University Institute, Florence.

Related website addresses

www.open.ac.uk/socialsciences/identities/projects/connolly.html

Sean Connolly’s original research was on the social history of Irish Catholicism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.  His work then shifted back in time to focus on the distinctive religious, political and social history of post-Restoration Ireland. In 2007-8 he brought his work on early modern Ireland to a conclusion by publishing a comprehensive overview, forming two volumes of the Oxford History of Early Modern Europe and covering the period 1460-1800.  His next project was on the social history of late Georgian and Victorian Belfast.  He is now working on a history of the Irish diaspora, viewed in the context of the development of a world economy. 

Professor  Connolly teaches on the following programmes / modules: