Shaping History Tyler Anbinder and Tomás Finn in conversation with Mary McAuliffe

Join Tyler Anbinder and Tomás Finn in conversation with fellow historian Mary McAuliffe about their richly researched historical works. Anbinder’s Plentiful Country (Eriu), is a gripping narrative of Irish immigrants who transformed America after the Great Hunger, defying hardship to redefine the American dream. Inside Rural Ireland (UCD Press), edited by Tomás Finn and Tony Varley, explores how and why the Irish countryside has changed throughout modern history, as influenced by politics, agriculture, civic activists, intellectuals and more.

© Christopher Langford

Tyler Anbinder is an emeritus professor of history at George Washington University, where he taught courses on the history of American immigration and the American Civil War era. He is the author of three award-winning books and of numerous articles, and his publications have been honoured with the Avery Craven Prize of the Organization of American Historians, the Mark Lynton History Prize of the Columbia School of Journalism, and the Hubbell Prize of the Society of Civil War Historians. Anbinder has also held the Fulbright Commission’s Thomas Jefferson Distinguished Chair in American History at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, and has won three prestigious research grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Tomás Finn is a lecturer in History at the University of Galway. His publications include Tuairim, Intellectual Debate and Policy formulation: Rethinking Ireland, 1954-75) and a chapter, ‘‘Towards a Better Ireland’: Donal Barrington and the Irish Constitution’, in Judges, Politics and the Irish Constitution. These works examine modern Ireland, specifically intellectuals, civil society and church and state and the ways these different actors sought to re-invent the governance of Ireland in cultural, social, political and economic terms.

Mary McAuliffe is a historian and Director of Gender Studies at UCD. Her latest publications include with Harriet Wheelock, are The Diaries of Kathleen Lynn; A Life Revealed through Personal Writing (UCD Press, 2023), and co-edited with Jennifer Redmond, The politics of gender and sexuality in modern Ireland, A Reader published by Four Courts Press in August, 2024