The department's research seminar (Thursday evenings during teaching term) attracts distinguished speakers from Ireland and abroad, and provides research students with an opportunity to present their work. See full schedule below.

ALL ARE WELCOME TO ATTEND

Thursday 28 March 2019
 
Venue:   Seminar Room, First Floor, Iontas Building, MU North Campus
 

5.00 pm ‘‘Passionate and Practical Patriotism’: The Maynooth chaplain in World War One’
Speaker:   Barbara McCormack (PhD student, MU Department of History)
 
Synopsis
Irish Catholic priests represented approximately one in four Catholic chaplains serving with the British Forces in the First World War. This cohort included both secular and diocesan priests, many of whom were educated in seminaries like St Patrick’s College, Maynooth. In fact, Maynooth graduates represented about thirty per cent of the approximately 200 Irish Catholic chaplains in the British army, constituting the largest cohort of Irish priests. Maynooth graduates also represented approximately ten per cent of the casualties faced by the Catholic clergy in the British army during WWI. Yet very little scholarly research has been undertaken on these men to date. This paper aims to create a profile of the average Maynooth chaplain in the British army by analysing the results of a randomised sample taken from a research population of sixty Maynooth graduates who served as commissioned chaplains. It will also explore the impact of factors such as education, age, and socioeconomic background on recruitment.

6.00pm   ‘Developing a spatial identity: Upper Franconia in the 19th and 20th centuries’
Speaker:   Professor Martin Ott (University of Bayreuth)

Synopsis:
This paper focuses on how a common identity emerged in a region whose people had little in common before its formation as an administrative district in early 19th century Bavaria. Its newly created denomination ‘Upper Franconia’ – ‘Oberfranken’ – was meant to emphasise a shared heritage in a distant past. In reality, actual 19th and 20th century experiences and challenges, including proximity to threatening borders and structural transformations of the economy, may have done much more to shape Upper Franconian identity up to the present day.

  History Research Seminar schedule, semester one, 2018-19
  History Research Seminar programme Semester 2, 2018-19