Ciaran O'Neill
My work mostly clusters in the long nineteenth century and spans fairly diverse themes. I am interested in social and cultural history, the history of education and elites, the Irish relationship with empire, modern literature, and public history. Right now I am finishing a monograph about people, power, and the state, as well as a collaborative research project that focuses on the Eastern Caribbean. I am Principal Investigator of Seeing Ireland: Art, Culture, and Power in Paris 1922, funded by the Commemorations Unit at DTAGSM, and of RISING, a Creative Ireland Climate Action collaboration between Trinity, Brokentalkers, Dublin Theatre Festival, and Algorithm. I co-direct the Trinity’s Colonial Legacies project with my colleague, Dr Patrick Walsh. Recent and forthcoming work appears in Gender & History, Journal of Victorian Culture, Journal of the History of Sexuality, and Radical History Review. I have held visiting fellowships in the University of São Paulo, Boston College, University of Notre Dame, and in SMU Halifax, Nova Scotia. Since 2020 I have served as Deputy Director of Trinity Long Room Hub.
Phone: +353 1 8961405
Address: Department of History
Trinity College
Dublin 2
Phone: +353 1 8961405
Address: Department of History
Trinity College
Dublin 2
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Mick O’Dea PRHA is known for his paintings of the War of Independence, images culled from found and researched photographs. The very act of painting and enlarging figures from the past redeems them from the chill of photographic documentation recalling them as living breathing subjects. The fact that he extended that exercise to both sides of that war points to the complications that history now holds as we move away from the ideology of the nation state. O’Dea was stimulated by his childhood experience of the 50th anniversary of the Rising in 1966, to have a life long interest in Irish history and spurring him on, as an adult artist, to re-imagine and re-create events from that era.
Mick O’Dea has decided to embrace the events of that Easter weekend in four monumental canvases sited in the vicinity of central Dublin – the GPO, Upper O’Connell Street, the RHA on Middle Abbey Street and College Green. His large writ images offer both details and approximations, accuracy and ambiguity. O’Dea, who also trained as a sculptor, for the first time in twenty years adds three dimensional elements to his exhibition. Funky and figurative, these objects have a potency that rises above the abject materials of their making and comments on matters of monumentality, history and humanity.
The artist is introducing a further risk to the exhibition by opting for a theatrical presentation of the work. The stark spots and dark shadows amplifying our oscillating comprehension of historic events as they are but through the alembic of recollection, recreation and revisionism. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by Trinity historian Ciaran O’Neill, co-published with Ballina Arts Centre and Mayo County County Council. A version of the exhibition will be shown in Ballinglen Art Foundation, Ballycastle and Ballina Arts Centre in late July and August 2016.
particular issues for scholars concerned with communicating the
complexities of the Irish past to undergraduate and graduate students.
The guest editors organized a roundtable to consider some
of these challenges and to map out potential ways in which students
can be successfully engaged in locating Irish history in a wider context.
Michael de Nie (MdeN), Mo Moulton (MM), and Ciaran O’Neill
(CON) participated in an online discussion between November 2015
and January 2016; they were later given the opportunity to review
their contributions. Enda Delaney (ED) moderated the roundtable.