Muiris MacGiollabhuí
Dr. Muiris MacGiollabhuí is the Institute's Moore-Livingston Fellow for the 2020-2021 academic year. He completed his PhD in History at the University of California, Santa Cruz in June 2019 and spent the last academic year teaching at Santa Clara University—primarily world history courses that focused on the history of imperialism in the early modern and modern periods as well as American colonial history.
During the 2020-2021 academic year, Dr. MacGiollabhuí will be working on his book manuscript, “Sons of Exile: The United Irishmen in Transnational Perspective 1791-1827.” This project is a transnational history of the United Irishmen which recasts them as Atlantic, rather than solely Irish, revolutionaries. It follows their exile from Ireland throughout the Atlantic World, including British Canada, the United States, Jamaica, and Latin America. By studying the exile of the United Irishmen, it is possible to ask a question that is pertinent to the late eighteenth century generally: What did it mean to be revolutionary during the “Age of Revolution”? Using the revolutionary ideology of the United Irishmen as a lens, and their exile as a case study, he will assess in this project the radicalism of the United Irishmen.
Dr. MacGiollabhuí's work has appeared most recently in the Yearbook of Transnational History in the spring 2019 edition. His article, “Carrying the Green Bough: The Transnational Exile of the United Irishmen, 1791-1806,” explores the physical dimensions of exile that the United Irishmen experienced, and the psychological impact that exile had on them as they were cast all around the world.
His next article, “Irish Liberty, Black Slavery, and the Green Atlantic: The Racial Ideology of the United Irishmen,” is currently under review for publication, and explores the contractions of the United Irish racial ideology.
He has also begun research for a second book project: a comparative history of exile in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which will explore the shared experiences of exile from the vantage of the Jamaican Maroons, French Acadians, Indian Tamils, and the United Irishmen.
Dr. MacGiollabhuí was born in Dublin but is a child of the Gaeltacht—the Irish-speaking area of Ireland. He has lived in North America for the past 11 years, both in Vancouver, British Columbia, and California. While his spoken Irish has diminished while away from Ireland, his love of Irish history remains. When not writing, he obsesses over his two sporting loves—Manchester United and the Edmonton Oilers. He loves cooking, cycling, and hiking, but rarely all at once. Prior to the pandemic he could be found ruining the songs of others at karaoke and playing pool.