Ulster Society for Irish Historical Studies

@usihs.bsky.social

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Promoting Irish History in Ulster since 1936. https://usihs36.com/

19 Feb: Neil Murphy on 'Violence, colonialism and the mid-Tudor monarchy: Ireland in context' 5 March: Antonia Hart on 'Ulster women in business and bankruptcy, 1888-1922' 23 April: David Dickson on 'The Foyle, the Chesapeake, and a fifty-year transatlantic conversation'
Seán stood at the lectern while Simon introduces him
Ulster Society for Irish Historical Studies Seminars, Autumn 2025 Seminars usually take place in hybrid format on Thursdays at 6pm. In person seminars are hosted in the Institute of Irish Studies, 27 University Square, Queen’s University Belfast. Please sign up to the Eventbrite for a link to the Teams meeting – these will be circulated to the USIHS mailing list and on the USIHS Bluesky. Thursday 16 October: Seán Ó Hoireabhárd (Maynooth University), When Ulster became Ulster and Meath became Meath: The divorce of the Northern and Southern Uí Néill in the Central Middle Ages Thursday 13 November: Bridget Keown (University of Pittsburgh), title TBD Please note this seminar will be online only and will take place at 7pm (GMT). Thursday 4 December: Henry Jefferies (UU), Irish women and the Reformation All are welcome to join us! If you would like to join the USIHS mailing list, please get in touch – details can be found on the USIHS website (www.usihs36.com)
A woman (with a great dress and earrings) standing behind a PRONI lectern. The title slide behind her reads The Anti-Abortion Movement in Ireland
Inner Lives and Outer Realities How does the individual experience history? How are lives lived against the backdrop of conflict and revolutions, of social transformation and religious change? Such questions raise a central issue of historical interpretation – that concerning the relationship between the exercise of individual agency and the circumscribing influence of social, political and cultural context. This relationship – or perhaps, more accurately, this tension – was famously captured by Karl Marx: ‘men make their own history,’ he observed, ‘but they do not make it as they please’. Taking a lead from Emma Rothschild’s 2011 study, The inner life of empires, a book which uses a single family to explore the revolutionary transformations – political, intellectual and imperial – of the eighteenth century, the 2025 Irish Conference of Historians will seek to interrogate this relationship. Keynote addresses will be delivered by Professor Lindsey Earner-Byrne (Trinity College Dublin) and Professor M’Hamed Oualdi (European University Institute), and paper and panel proposals are invited on the theme, broadly defined, of ‘Inner Lives and Outer Realities’. These may include, but are not limited to, proposals addressing the individual’s experience of war and conflict; social transformation; urbanisation; religious change (including, especially, the Reformation and Counter-Reformation); cultural and linguistic change; revolution; and colonisation and de-colonisation.