Community News – Irish Committee of Historical Sciences

Borders and Boundaries features selected papers from the 33rd Irish Conference of Historians held by the University of Galway in May 2021 on the theme of ‘Borders and Boundaries’. It covers the medieval to the contemporary, allowing a long view to be taken of the north-west border of Ireland, the borders of the early modern state, the impact of the partition of Ireland and social boundaries in the late twentieth century. It aims to stimulate debate and highlight how borders can be written out of history while remaining essential to comprehending the making and remaking of our worlds.

This volume will be of value for those interested in border studies, Irish history and modern history.

Table of Contents:

1 Introduction: The Making and Re-making of Borders

Tomás Finn and Kieran Hoare

2 Limerick c. AD 1200: A frontier city in Europe’s Wild West

Catherine Swift

3 Historical Boundaries and Historic Borders: The Case of Cairpre Dromma Clíabh

Seán Ó Hoireabhárd

4 Urban Oligarchies and Border Society in later medieval Ireland

Kieran Hoare

5 ‘Tudor England’s French Frontier: The Laws of Guînes (1529) and the Defence of the Calais Pale’

Neil Murphy

6 Conquest or recovery: enlarging the English Pale in early Tudor Ireland

Steven Ellis

7 The Final Tudor Frontier: the north-west of Ireland in the late sixteenth century

Christopher Maginn

8 Early Modern Border Management and New Historiographical Approaches

Raingard Esser

9 Building Narratives: Ireland and the Borders of Architectural History

Leslie Herman

10 Protestant Demographic Dynamics in early Twentieth Century Ireland, 1901–26

Barry Keane

11 The Day-to-Day Effects of Partition

Cormac Moore

12 Within an Imaginary Border: The ‘Protestant Free State’ in Independent Ireland

Ian d’Alton

13 Fault Lines of Trade Union Disunity, 1922–1939

Gerard Hanley

14 ‘A peripatetic university for catholic social activists’: John Hayes and the international origins of Muintir na Tire’s ‘Rural Weeks’

Barry Sheppard

15 Beyond the pale? Representations of the Teddy boy subculture in Irish theatre, 1955–1965

Ciara Molloy

16 Politics and the praxis of power: the political establishment and the talented young in post-world war II Ireland

Tomas Finn

17 ‘To Hell or to Connaught’: Margaret Thatcher, Northern Ireland and the Prospect of Repartition, 1979–1990

Stephen Kelly

Publication: Raingard Esser and Steven G. Ellis, Borders, Bordering Practices and Mobility in Early Modern Europe (Hannover, 2025).

ICH_ADMIN

We are delighted to announce that a volume based on some of the papers given at the 33rd Irish Conference of Historians is now in print:

Abstract:

The debates on borders and their management are not a modern phenomenon, harnessed to the rise of the nation state. Borders had already been carefully discussed and negotiated in early modern times. The present volume will respond to recent trends in the historiography of early modern borders, boundaries, and their management from a European perspective. Three important strands have informed recent scholarship on early modern borders: firstly, the study of borders in the context of concepts of sovereignty, territoriality, and the law. Secondly, a praxeological approach to border management analysing the instruments and methods of bordering also in the context of changing spheres and practices of knowledge-production. Thirdly, the study of borders within the framework of migration and mobility studies. These approaches, which are sometimes addressed together in overlapping research, will be discussed in the articles brought together in this volume.

For more details and to purchase, please visit: https://wehrhahn-verlag.de/public/index.php?ID_Section=2&ID_Category=75&ID_Product=1655