Bio

Edward was awarded his PhD from Queen's University Belfast for his doctoral thesis entitled 'Race, History, Nationality: An Intellectual History of the Young Ireland movement 1842-52'.  Previously, he studied at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he received a distinction in the MA programme in Postcolonial Culture and Global Policy.   Before that he studied at the University of Glasgow. He joined the University of Liverpool Institute of Irish Studies as a Busteed Postdoctoral Scholar in the summer of 2018 before being appointed lecturer there the following year. He has also taught at Queen's University, Belfast and Newham College in East London. Edward has also worked as a researcher for the Electoral Reform Society. He has recently been awarded a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship for his two year project entitled ´Between History and Revolution: Radical Irish Separatism from Tone to Pearse´, which re-evaluates the intellectual underpinning of Irish nationalism in the long nineteenth century. Edward has published his work in Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, Irish Political Studies and, most recently, Victorian Periodicals Review." 

Abstract

Between History and Revolution: Radical Separatism in Ireland from Tone to Pearse offers a novel reappraisal of the ideas that informed radical Irish nationalism in the long nineteenth century. A key part of this will be reading the works of prominent Irish nationalists to excavate the justifications that they use for their assertions of the right of Ireland to be independent of Britain. This work will therefore look at the books, newspapers, pamphlets and literature produced by the nationalist movement from the 1790s to 1916. Two major modes of argumentation for separation can be discerned. One is based on a language of rights largely inherited from liberal revolutionary traditions from Ireland, England, America and France. These arguments usually follow from the idea that people are imbued with natural rights that entitle them as individuals to political equality and access to democratic representation, against claims that there is any basis for inherited power or privilege. The other major type of argument is one based on the idea that Ireland exists as an historical entity and that this is the basis of its independent existence. This relies not on a claim to individual rights, but rather that the historic right of nations to govern themselves is the basis of the moral and political order. Different iterations of advanced nationalist movements in Ireland during the long nineteenth century modulated between these versions of the language of rights. Critics have often understood the resulting ideologies of separatism within the hackneyed binaries of constitutional versus violent nationalism, civic versus ethnic, rational versus irrational. My book will show that there is a continuity between these apparently contradictory forms of nationalist ideology and that this continuity is revealed by bringing to light how are arguments for independence are framed around competing notions of history and revolution.