Charles Gavan Duffy had a rich life. A founder and editor of the Irish nationalist newspaper, the Nation, a leader of the Young Ireland movement, and a tenant rights advocate, he became Prime Minister of Australia and then returned to Ireland to become involved in Irish cultural national politics in the last years of his life. As a wealthy moderate Irish Catholic nationalist, Duffy’s life is not representative of the nineteenth-century Irish experience, but it does epitomize both the global dimensions of that experience and the complexity of the Irish nationalist relationship to the British empire (Duffy was ennobled for his service in Australia). By charting Duffy’s global journey from Ireland to Australia and back, this talk is designed to provide a rich sense of both the complexity and significance of the nineteenth century Irish experience.

 

Dr. Sean Farrell is Associate Professor of History at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb and he serves as President of the American Conference for Irish Studies.  He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in modern Irish and British History.  His primary research and teaching interests focus on the history of imperialism, nationalism, sectarianism, violence, power and popular culture in Ireland and Northern Ireland, as well as the history and influence of the Irish Diaspora.  

 

Dr. Farrell serves as the editor of the New Hibernia Review, an Irish Studies journal. He is the author and editor of several books on nineteenth-century Irish history, including Rituals and Riots: Sectarian Violence and Political Culture in Modern Ulster, 1784-1886, which won the Donald Murphy Prize for Distinguished First Book in Irish Studies.  He currently is completing a book on the Working Class and the Church of Ireland in Early Victorian Belfast and he is preparing to work on a biography of the nineteenth-century Irish nationalist intellectual and politician, Charles Gavan Duffy.