Sarah Roddy

I am Lecturer in Modern Irish Social History. Before arriving at Maynooth in January 2021, I spent 9 years as, successively, Research Assistant, Hallsworth Research Fellow, Lecturer and Senior Lecturer in Modern Irish History at the University of Manchester. My doctorate and MA were completed at Queen's University Belfast, and my undergraduate degree in History and Politics is from the University of Limerick.

My research interests lie in modern Irish and British social, economic and religious history. My doctoral research explored the attitudes and responses of the Catholic, Presbyterian and Anglican churches in Ireland to mass outward migration during the nineteenth century. It did so in comparative, thematic terms and with a fresh emphasis on the effects that migration had on the sending rather than the receiving society. This work was published as Population, providence and empire: The churches and emigration from nineteenth-century Ireland by Manchester University Press in late 2014.

I have also published essays and articles on nineteenth-century print culture, on Irish missionaries and empire, on various aspects of Ireland's 'spiritual empire', and on religious fundraising. 

In addition, I have produced, with Professors Bertrand Taithe and Julie-Marie Strange, articles on the regulation of the charity fund-raising market in late Victorian Britain, and in 2018 we published, with Bloomsbury, a monograph entitled The Charity Market and the making of modern humanitarianism, 1870-1912.

My current project, entitled 'Visible Divinity: Money and Irish Catholicism, 1850-1921', is a transnational examination of the financial relationship between the Irish Catholic Church and its laity, and was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council in the UK. I am also developing a spin-off project (PARISH: Preserving and Recording Ireland's Sacred Heritage) on crowdsourcing church inscriptions in collaboration with the University of Notre Dame in the US.