Dr. Peter Hart

Canada Research Chair in Irish Studies

Phone: 709-737-8425
E-mail: phart@mun.ca

Achievements: Author of The I.R.A. and Its Enemies, which won three awards, including the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize (1998); Author of British Intelligence in Ireland 1920-21: the Final Reports (2002) and Guerrilla Days in the U.K.: Revolution in Ireland and Britain (forthcoming); internationally recognized scholar on the Irish Revolution.

Research Involves: Exploration of community, identity and violence in Ireland and the transatlantic world.

Research Relevance: Work will provide historical insight into modern-day understandings of community, and identity violence at regional and national levels.

Coming to Canada from: Queen's University at Belfast, Northern Ireland

Irish Nationalism, Community and Violence

The Irish Revolution is only now becoming a subject of detailed scholarly debate. The early 1900's were a formative period for late modern Irish politics; it saw the formation of modern political culture and geography, the settling of the land and national questions, partition and the creation of new minorities, and the establishment of the two Irish states.

The research of Dr. Peter Hart, Canada Research Chair in Irish Studies, aims to explain the identities, communities and violence that drove these changes to their conclusion.

Building on his earlier work, Dr. Hart will examine questions about Irish identity and mobilization in Britain in the 1910s and 1920s. His research will focus on nationalist activists and their relationships with their perceived homeland, the wider immigrant communities, and the British population and state as a whole. As part of this project, he will also look at transatlantic networks that linked Ireland and Britain to North America and Europe.

In addition to studies of Ireland and its diaspora, Dr. Hart will be pursuing his research themes at an individual level by writing an interpretative biography of Michael Collins. In the long term, Dr. Hart will address broader questions of political and social structure and change. He will extend his study of Irish ethnicity, nationalism, politics and violence from the 1880's to the 1930's, collecting data on activists and events throughout Ireland, drawing primarily on newspapers and official records.

Students and collaborators at the Memorial University of Newfoundland will benefit from Dr. Hart's exceptional research, which will generate tremendously rich data applicable to a variety of research interests. His position, along with the exceptional resources and personnel already in place, will make Memorial a national centre for Irish studies. Moreover, allied with expertise in Newfoundland and Maritime studies, it will enhance the university's standing as an international centre for the study of North Atlantic societies.