Peter Gray (born 1965) is Professor of Modern Irish History at Queen's University Belfast. He specializes in the history of British-Irish relations in the 19th century, particularly the Great Irish Famine.
He is a member of the International Network of Irish Famine Studies, [1] and a member of the Irish Association of Professional Historians. [2] Gray was Head of the School of History and Anthropology and Professor of Modern Irish History at Queen's University Belfast from 2010 to 2015. [3] In 2015 Gray was an Eaton Visitor Fellow at the University of New Brunswick, researching the impact of the Great Famine on New Brunswick. [4]
Professor Donald MacRaild of the University of Ulster called Famine, Land and Politics "by far the best book written on the Famine". [5]
The Great Famine, also known as the Great Hunger, the Famine and the Irish Potato Famine, was a period of mass starvation and disease in Ireland lasting from 1845 to 1852 that constituted a historical social crisis and had a major impact on Irish society and history as a whole. The most severely affected areas were in the western and southern parts of Ireland—where the Irish language was dominant—hence the period was contemporaneously known in Irish as an Drochshaol, which literally translates to "the bad life" and loosely translates to "the hard times".
Francis Stewart Leland Lyons was an Irish historian and academic who served as the 40th Provost of Trinity College Dublin from 1974 to 1981.
The legacy of the Great Famine in Ireland followed a catastrophic period of Irish history between 1845 and 1852 during which time the population of Ireland was reduced by 50 percent.
Ireland was part of the United Kingdom from 1801 to 1922. For almost all of this period, the island was governed by the UK Parliament in London through its Dublin Castle administration in Ireland. Ireland underwent considerable difficulties in the 19th century, especially the Great Famine of the 1840s which started a population decline that continued for almost a century. The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw a vigorous campaign for Irish Home Rule. While legislation enabling Irish Home Rule was eventually passed, militant and armed opposition from Irish unionists, particularly in Ulster, opposed it. Proclamation was shelved for the duration following the outbreak of World War I. By 1918, however, moderate Irish nationalism had been eclipsed by militant republican separatism. In 1919, war broke out between republican separatists and British Government forces. Subsequent negotiations between Sinn Féin, the major Irish party, and the UK government led to the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, which resulted in five-sixths of the island seceding from the United Kingdom, becoming the Irish Free State, with only the six northeastern counties remaining within the United Kingdom.
Donald Harman Akenson is an American historian and author. He is a fellow of both the Royal Society of Canada and the Royal Historical Society (UK). He is a Molson Prize Laureate, awarded for a lifetime contribution to Canadian culture. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1984, and in 1992 he won the Grawemeyer Award. Akenson received his B.A. from Yale University and his doctorate from Harvard University. He is Distinguished University Professor and Douglas Professor of History at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, and was simultaneously Beamish Research Professor at the Institute of Irish Studies, University of Liverpool (2006–10), and senior editor of the McGill-Queen's University Press (1982-2012).
The history of Ireland from 1691–1800 was marked by the dominance of the Protestant Ascendancy. These were Anglo-Irish families of the Anglican Church of Ireland, whose English ancestors had settled Ireland in the wake of its conquest by England and colonisation in the Plantations of Ireland, and had taken control of most of the land. Many were absentee landlords based in England, but others lived full-time in Ireland and increasingly identified as Irish.. During this time, Ireland was nominally an autonomous Kingdom with its own Parliament; in actuality it was a client state controlled by the King of Great Britain and supervised by his cabinet in London. The great majority of its population, Roman Catholics, were excluded from power and land ownership under the penal laws. The second-largest group, the Presbyterians in Ulster, owned land and businesses but could not vote and had no political power. The period begins with the defeat of the Catholic Jacobites in the Williamite War in Ireland in 1691 and ends with the Acts of Union 1800, which formally annexed Ireland in a United Kingdom from 1 January 1801 and dissolved the Irish Parliament.
The Royal University of Ireland was a university in Ireland that existed from 1879 to 1909. It was founded in accordance with the University Education (Ireland) Act 1879 as an examining and degree-awarding university based on the model of the University of London. A royal charter was issued on 27 April 1880 and examinations were open to candidates irrespective of attendance at college lectures. The first chancellor was the Irish chemist Robert Kane.
Anti-Irish sentiment, also Hibernophobia, is bigotry against the Irish people or individuals. It can include hatred, oppression, persecution, as well as simple discrimination. Generally, it could be against the island of Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, or Northern Ireland. Specifically, it could be directed against Irish immigrants, or their descendants, throughout the world, who are known as the Irish diaspora.
Events from the year 1849 in Ireland.
Events from the year 1845 in Ireland.
Events from the year 1847 in Ireland.
Events from the year 1843 in Ireland.
The chronology of the Great Famine documents a period of Irish history between 29 November 1845 and 1852 during which time the population of Ireland was reduced by 20 to 25 percent. The proximate cause was famine resulting from a potato disease commonly known as late blight. Although blight ravaged potato crops throughout Europe during the 1840s, the impact and human cost in Ireland – where a third of the population was entirely dependent on the potato for food but which also produced an abundance of other food – was exacerbated by a host of political, social and economic factors which remain the subject of historical debate.
The Ashfield Gales consisted of six generations of a Gale family who owned the Ashfield estate in Killabban Parish, Queens County, Ireland from the mid-17th Century until 1851.
Keith John Jeffery MRIA was a Northern Irish historian specialising in modern British, British Imperial, and Irish history.
Edna Longley, is an Irish literary critic and cultural commentator specialising in modern Irish and British poetry.
Christine Kinealy is an Irish historian, author, and founding director of Ireland's Great Hunger Institute at Quinnipiac University. She is an authority on Irish history.
Sean Joseph Connolly, is an Irish historian, initially specialising in the social history of Irish Catholicism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but more recently on post-Reformation and early modern Ireland and modern Belfast. From 1996 to 2017, he was professor of Irish history at Queen's University Belfast, and has been emeritus professor there since 2017. After completing his undergraduate degree at University College, Dublin, and his doctorate at the University of Ulster, Connolly worked as an archivist at Public Record Office of Ireland from 1977 to 1980, before spending a year lecturing in history at St Patrick's College, Dublin; he returned to the University of Ulster in 1981 as a lecturer and became a reader there in 1990. Connolly was also Vice-President of the Royal Historical Society from 2014 to 2016, and was twice editor of the journal Irish Economic and Social History.
Carla King is a lecturer at St Patrick's College, Dublin and an author in Irish history. According to Diarmaid Ferriter, she is "peerless in her expertise on Michael Davitt".