Prof. Peter Gray

BA, PhD (Cambridge), FRHistS, MRIA

Professor of Modern Irish History

Director, Institute of Irish Studies

School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics

Queen’s University Belfast

Belfast, Northern Ireland

Tel: +44 (0) 28 9097 3433 / 5226
E-mail: p.h.gray@qub.ac.uk

Twitter: @petergray47

Mastodon : @petergray47@mastodon.ie

Office: 12 University Square 0G.003 / 27 University Square 0G.005

Peter Gray took his undergraduate and doctoral degrees at the University of Cambridge before holding research fellowships at the Institute of Irish Studies at Queen’s, and at Downing College, Cambridge. He taught Irish and British history at the University of Southampton 1996-2005, before returning to Belfast to take up the position of Professor of Modern Irish History. In 2004 Professor Gray was the Burns Library Visiting Professor in Irish Studies at Boston College, Massachusetts, and was Fredrik and Catherine Eaton Visiting Fellow at the University of New Brunswick in 2015. He will hold the O’Donnell Visiting Fellowship in Irish Studies at the University of Melbourne in Jan-Feb 2023. He was chair of the Royal Irish Academy’s National Committee for Historical Sciences 2007-10, and was Head of the School of History and Anthropology at Queen’s in 2010-15. He is a member and former president of the Ulster Society for Irish Historical Studies. He was elected a Member of the Royal Irish Academy in 2013. He has been Director of the Institute of Irish Studies at Queen’s University Belfast since November 2016, and is Chair of the Wiles Lectures Trustees.

Research Interests

Professor Gray’s research specialism is in the history of British-Irish relations c.1800–70, especially the political history of the Great Famine of 1845–50 and the politics of poverty and land in the nineteenth century. He has written a history of the origins and implementation of the 1838 Irish Poor Law Act, and is currently completing a study of the Ulster radical William Sharman Crawford in his wider family context. He has interests in the history of nineteenth-century political economy and social thought, in comparative imperial history (especially nineteenth-century Ireland and India), in historical memory and commemoration, and in the history of the Irish lord lieutenancy.

He directed the EPPI project to digitise Parliamentary Papers relating to Ireland 1800–1922, and the DIPPAM digitisation project, and is PI for the AHRC-funded project ‘Welfare and Public Health in Belfast and its Region, c.1800-1973’. He is a core member of the International Network of Irish Famine Studies.

Select Publications

Books:

• William Sharman Crawford and Ulster radicalism (forthcoming with University College Dublin Press)
• The Great Irish Famine and social class: conflicts, responsibilities, representations. ed. with Marguerite Corporaal (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2019).
• La Grande Famine en Irlande, 1845-1851. with Pauline Collombier-Lakeman (Paris: Editions Fahrenheit, 2015).
• The Irish lord lieutenancy c.1541-1922. ed. with Olwen Purdue (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2012)
• Poverty and welfare in Ireland 1838-1948. ed. with Virginia Crossman (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2011).
• The making of the Irish poor law 1815-43. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009).
• Victoria’s Ireland? Irishness and Britishness 1837–1901. ed. (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004).
• The memory of catastrophe. ed. with Kendrick Oliver (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004). [link]
• Famine, land and politics: British government and Irish society 1843–1850. (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1999)
• The Irish Famine.  (London: Thames & Hudson, 1995). (French translation, Gallimard 1995; Korean translation, Sigongsa, 1998; Chinese translation, Horizon Media, 2005)

Articles and chapters:

• ‘Was the Great Irish Famine a colonial famine?’, in East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies, 8:1 (2021). Special issue on ‘Empire, Colonialism, and Famine in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.’
• ‘William Sharman Crawford, the Famine and County Down’, in Marguerite Corporaal and Peter Gray (eds), The Great Irish Famine and social class: conflicts, responsibilities, representations (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2019), pp. 135-50
• [with Marguerite Corporaal] ‘Introduction’ in Marguerite Corporaal and Peter Gray (eds), The Great Irish Famine and social class: conflicts, responsibilities, representations (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2019), pp. 1-26
• ‘HB’s Famine cartoons: satirical art in a time of catastrophe’, in Marguerite Corporaal, Oona Frawley and Emily Mark-Fitzgerald (eds), The Great Famine and its legacies: visual and material culture (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018), pp. 35-52.
• ‘The Great Famine 1845-50’ in James Kelly (ed.), Cambridge history of Ireland, Vol. III 1730-1880 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 639-65
• ‘Mabel Sharman Crawford’s Life in Tuscany: Ulster radicalism in a hot climate’, in Marguerite Corporaal and Christina Morin (eds), Traveling Irishness in the long nineteenth century (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. 35-50.
• ‘”The Great British Famine of 1845-50″? Ireland, the UK and peripherality in famine relief and philanthropy’, in Declan Curran, Lyubomir Luciuk and Andrew G. Newby (eds), Famines in European economic history: the last great European famines reconsidered (London: Routledge, 2015), pp. 83-96.
• ‘The development of official knowledge about Irish rural society in the nineteenth century’, in Nadine Vivier (ed.) The golden age of state inquiries: rural enquiries in the nineteenth century – from fact gathering to political instrument (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), pp. 59-74.
• ‘The Great Famine in Irish and British historiographies, c. 1860-1914’ in Marguerite Corporaal, et al (eds.) Global legacies of the Great Irish Famine (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2014), pp. 39-60. [pdf]
• ‘Famine and land, 1845-80’, in Alvin Jackson (ed.), Oxford handbook to modern Irish history (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 544-61.
• ‘Conceiving and constructing the Irish workhouse, 1836-45′, in Irish Historical Studies, xxxviii, 149 (2012), pp. 22-35
• ‘A “people’s viceroyalty”? Popularity, theatre and executive politics, 1835-47’, in Peter Gray and Olwen Purdue (eds), The Irish Lord Lieutenancy, c.1541-1922, (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2012), pp 158-78. [PDF]
• ‘British relief measures’ and ‘Charles Trevelyan’, in John Crowley, William J. Smyth and Mike Murphy (eds), Atlas of the Great Irish Famine (Cork: Cork University Press, 2012), pp. 75-86.
• ‘Introduction: Poverty and welfare in Ireland, 1838-1948’, in Virginia Crossman and Peter Gray (eds), Poverty and welfare in Ireland 1838-1948 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2011), pp. 1-22 (with Virginia Crossman).
• ‘Irish social thought and the relief of poverty, 1847-1880′, in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, xx (2010), pp. 141-56
• ‘Accounting for catastrophe: William Wilde, the 1851 Irish census and the Great Famine’, in Michael de Nie and Sean Farrell (eds), Power and popular culture in modern Ireland: essays in honour of James S. Donnelly, Jr., (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2010), pp. 50-66. [PDF]
• ‘Thomas Chalmers and Irish poverty’, in James McConnel and Frank Ferguson (eds), Across the water: Ireland and Scotland in the nineteenth century, (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2009), pp. 93-107.
• ‘The European food crisis and the relief of Irish famine, 1845-50’, in Cormac Ó Gráda, Richard Paping and Eric Vanhaute (eds), When the potato failed: causes and effects of the ‘last’ European subsistence crisis, 1845-1850 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), pp. 95-107. [PDF]
• ‘Famine and land in Ireland and India, 1845–1880: James Caird and the political economy of hunger’ in Historical Journal, xlix, 1 (2006), pp. 193-215
• ‘“Ireland’s last fetter struck off”: the lord lieutenancy debate 1800-67’, in Terry McDonough (ed.), Was Ireland a colony? Economics, politics and culture in nineteenth-century Ireland (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2005), pp. 87-101 [PDF]
• ‘”Hints and hits”: Irish caricature and the trial of Daniel O’Connell, 1843-4’, in History Ireland, 12:4 (2004), pp. 45-51 [Full Text]
• ‘Introduction’, and ‘The making of mid-Victorian Ireland? Political economy and the memory of the Great Famine, 1847-80’, in Peter Gray (ed.), Victoria’s Ireland? Irishness and Britishness 1837-1901 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004), pp. 9-14, 151-166 [PDF]
• ‘Introduction: the memory of catastrophe’ [with Kendrick Oliver], and ‘Memory and the commemoration of the Great Irish Famine’, in Peter Gray and Kendrick Oliver (eds.), The memory of catastrophe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), pp. 1-18, 46-64 [PDF]
• ‘The peculiarities of Irish land tenure 1800–1914:  from agent of impoverishment to agent of pacification’ in Donald Winch and Patrick K. O’Brien (eds), The political economy of British historical experience, 1688–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 139-62.
• ‘National humiliation and the great hunger: fast and famine in 1847’ in Irish Historical Studies, xxxii, 126 (2000), pp. 193-216
• ‘”Shovelling out your paupers”: The British state and Irish Famine migration, 1846–50’ in Patterns of Prejudice, xxxiii (1999), pp. 47-65
• ‘Wellington and the government of Ireland, 1832–46’ in C.M. Woolgar (ed.), Wellington Studies III (Southampton: Hartley Institute, 1999), pp. 203-26
• ‘Nassau Senior, the Edinburgh Review, and Ireland 1843-1849’, in T. Foley and S. Ryder (eds), Ideology and Ireland in the nineteenth century (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1998), pp. 130-42 [Full text – OA]
• ‘Famine relief policy in comparative perspective: Ireland, Scotland, and North-western Europe, 1845-1849’, Eire-Ireland, 32:1 (1997), pp. 86-108 [Full text]
• ‘British public opinion and the Famine’, in B. Ó Conaire (ed.), Comdhail an Chroaibhin: conference proceedings 1995. An Gorta Mór (Boyle: Comhairle Contae Ros Comáin, 1996), pp. 56-74. [PDF]
• ‘The triumph of dogma: ideology and Famine relief’, History Ireland, 3:2 (1995) [Full Text]
• ‘Ideology and the Famine’, in Cathal Póirtéir (ed.) The Great Irish Famine: the Thomas Davis lectures (Cork: Mercier Press/RTÉ, 1995), pp. 86-103. [PDF]
• ‘Potatoes and providence: British government responses to the Great Famine’, Bullán: an Irish Studies Journal, 1:1 (1994), pp. 75-90. [Gray, Potatoes and providence PDF]
• ‘Punch and the Great Famine’, History Ireland, 1:2 (1993), pp. 26-33 [Full Text]

Online book reviews and working papers

• Book Review: R.J.C. Adams, Shadow of a Taxman (OUP, 2022), personal website review (Dec. 2022)
• ‘Representations of Irish Famine and Rebellion in the British Satirical Press, 1845-49’ (QUB Irish Studies Working Papers, 2020) [Full text PDF]

Projects:

• Paul Strzelecki and the Great Famine (2019) Exhibition catalogue [Strzelecki-catalogue.pdf] (Embassy of Poland in Ireland funded, 2018-19)

• ‘Welfare and public health in Belfast and the north of Ireland, c.1800-1973‘ (AHRC funded, 2012-15)
• DIPPAM: Documenting Ireland – Parliament, People and Migration (AHRC funded, 2010-11)

Networks:

• Associate, Heritages of Hunger project (NWO funded 2020-)
• International Network of Irish Famine Studies (NWO funded 2014-17)
  

Presentations:

Online:

• ‘The Hunger’, Tyrone Productions for RTE 1 TV (30 Nov. and 7 Dec. 2020)
• Interview for ‘The History Show’, RTE Radio 1, (29 Nov. 2020)
• ‘Count Paul Strzelecki and the Great Famine’ (lecture given at Royal Irish Academy, Dublin, 12 June 2019)
• History Now: ‘Political Cartoons‘ (March 2019)
• ‘The Great Hunger reassessed’ (History Ireland Hedge School, 20 Nov. 2018)
• ‘William Sharman Crawford and the Dynamics of Ulster Radicalism, 1830s-50s’ (given at Institute of Irish Studies, QUB, 10 Oct. 2016)
• ‘The Great Irish Famine and Transatlantic Historiographies, 1847-1914′ (given at Paris-Sorbonne University, 11 December 2014 – séance organisée avec Mondes anglophones, politique et société; podcast by SAS, University of London)
• ‘Blighted Nation, Part 2‘ (RTE Radio 1, 2013)

Recent Conference and Research Presentations:

• ‘The Sharman Crawfords of Crawfordsburn: the rise and fall of an Ulster radical dynasty’, SSNCI Annual Lecture, TCD, Dublin, 28 Feb. 2023.
• ‘Paul Strzelecki in Australia and Ireland’, MISS seminar, University of Melbourne, 8 Feb. 2023.
• “‘Trevelyanism’, the State and Famine in Ireland and British India, 1845-80’, The British Empire and Colonial Famines: History, Culture, Critique, University of Edinburgh, 8-9 Sep. 2022
• “Commemorating Famine Philanthropy: Paul Strzelecki in Ireland and Poland”, Heritages of Hunger, Nijmegen, 27-28 Jun. 2022
• ‘A battle like Waterloo’: The County Down election of 1852’, SSNCI (UCD), 24-5 Jun. 2022
• ‘Sharman Crawford and Irish Presbyterianism’, Robert Allen Memorial Lecture, Presbyterian Historical Society, Belfast, 5 May 2022.
• ‘The Puritan and the Libertine: Sharman Crawford and O’Connell in Political Satire, 1830-44’, ACIS (online), 30 April 2022.
• ‘Baron Eötvös and Count Strzelecki in Ireland: Poverty and Famine, 1837-49’, event organised by the Polish and Hungarian consulates in Belfast, Stormont, 25 Nov. 2021
• ‘William Sharman and the politics of Volunteering in Ulster, c.1780-1803’, USIHS (online), 11 Nov. 2021
• ’ ‘William Sharman Crawford and Agrarian Mobilisation in Ulster, 1847-54’, ESSHC Conference (online), 26 March 2021.
• ‘Paweł Strzelecki and the Great Irish Famine’, Pedagogical University Krakow and Poznan Town Hall, November 2019
• History Ireland Hedge School: ‘New directions in Famine history’, Dublin Port, 17 Nov. 2018
• ‘Roundtable: new directions in Irish Famine historiography’, ACIS, UCC Cork, 18-22 June 2018.
• ‘The agrarian thought of William Sharman Crawford’, European Social Science History Conference, Belfast, 4-7 April 2018.
• ‘Representations of Irish famine and rebellion in the British satirical press, 1845-49’, at ‘Graphic Satire in the Long Nineteenth Century’, University of Nottingham, 5 Sept. 2017
• ‘Assessing the British government’s response to the Irish Famine’, at Empires and famine in comparative historical perspective, Ukrainian House, Kyiv, Ukraine, 5-6 June 2017
• ‘William Sharman Crawford and the Great Famine’, ACIS, University of Missouri-Kansas City, 29 Mar.-1 Apr. 2017
• ‘Was the Great Irish Famine a colonial famine?’ (keynote) at Empire, Colonialism, and Famine in Comparative Historical Perspective, University of Toronto, Canada, 28-29 Oct. 2016
• ‘Deploying the memory of Irish famine: the crises of 1859-63 and 1879-81 and the contested meaning of the Great Famine’, at Collapse of Memory – Memory of Collapse, Lund University, Sweden, 20-22 Sept. 2016
• ‘William Sharman Crawford, the Famine, and land reclamation’, at ‘Nature and the Environment in Ireland during the Long 19th Century’, University of Southampton, 16-17 June 2016
• ‘“HB’s” Famine cartoons: satirical art in a time of catastrophe’, at ‘The Great Famine and its Impacts: Visual and Material Culture’, Maynooth University, 14-16 March 2016.
• ‘1847 – Year Zero?’, Nineteenth Century European Famines in Comparison, University of Helsinki, Finland, 7 Dec. 2015
• Keynote: ‘Locality and region in the making of British famine policy’, at 4^th Annual Famine Conference: ‘The Local and Regional Impact of the Great Irish Famine’, Strokestown Park, Co. Roscommon, 20-21 June 2015
• ‘Mabel Sharman Crawford’s Life in Tuscany: Ulster radicalism in a hot climate’, EFACIS conference, University of Palermo, Italy, 3-6 June 2015
• ‘La Grande Famine Irlandais: problemes et historiographie’, Centre culturel Irlandais, Paris, France, 12 Dec. 2014
• ‘The meaning of poverty – A workshop’, UCD, 5 Sept. 2014
• ‘Travelling Irishness in the Long Nineteenth Century’, University of Limerick, 28-29 Aug, 2014 (keynote)
• European Social Science History Conference, University of Vienna, Austria, 23-26 April 2014 (organised and spoke in panel on Comparative Famine in Ireland and Finland)
• ‘Global Legacies of the Irish Famine’ (Keynote), Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands, 25-28 March 2013

Current PhD first supervision:

• James Orchin, ‘A Moon among lesser Stars: William Windham and the English Right, 1780-1810’
• Constantin Jungkind Torve, ‘Valleys of Fear: Mapping Irish Secret Societies between Agrarian and Industrial Unrest, 1840-1880’
• Stuart Brown, ‘Alexander Brown & Transatlantic Radical Irish Presbyterianism, 1750 – 1850’
• Anthony Clyde, ”Surviving or Thriving?: Old Age, Poverty, and Welfare in Ulster, 1850-1911′.
• Grace McGrath, ‘Power, profit, plantocracy and the 2nd Earl Belmore’

Recent PhDs supervised:

• Karina Wendling, ‘Education, famine, and conversion: Evangelical missions’ strategies and accusations of Souperism in Catholic Ireland, 1800-1869′ (external co-supervision for L’École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris) PhD 2022.
• Michelle McCann, ‘A nineteenth-century Irish coroner: William Charles Waddell (1846-76). PhD 2018. [monograph]
• Fergal O’Leary, ‘Ireland and empire: colonial cultures and politics, 1882-1898’. PhD 2018.
• Robyn Atcheson, ‘Poverty, poor relief and public health in Belfast  c.1800-1851’. PhD 2017.
• Ruairi Cullen, ‘The Medieval period in nineteenth-century Irish historiography’. PhD 2016.
• Pamela Linden, ‘Jewish identity and community in Belfast, 1920-48’. PhD 2016.
• Paul Huddie, ‘Ireland’s responses to the Crimean War, 1854-6’. PhD. 2014. [monograph]
• Aidan Enright, ‘The political life of Charles Owen O’Conor, 1860-1906’. PhD. 2011. [monograph]
• Clare O’Kane, ‘A society in transition: Society, identity and nostalgia in rural Northern Ireland, 1939-68’. PhD. 2011.
• Peter Ludlow, ‘The Newfoundland-Irish in industrial Cape Breton, 1880-1920’, PhD. 2010.
• Sarah Roddy, ‘The churches and emigration from nineteenth-century Ireland’, PhD. 2010. [monograph]
• Claire Allen, ‘Urban elites, civil society and governance in early nineteenth-century Belfast’. PhD. 2010
• Mary Clarke, ‘The origins and impact of the Northcote-Trevelyan Report on civil service reform in Britain.’, PhD. 2010

Employment History:

• Professor of Modern Irish History, Queen’s University Belfast (2005-present)
• Burns Library Visiting Scholar in Irish Studies, Boston College, MA (2004)
• Lecturer/Senior Lecturer in History, University of Southampton (1996-2005)
• British Academy Posdoctoral Fellow, Downing College, University of Cambridge (1993-6)
• Junior Research Fellow, Institute of Irish Studies, Queen’s University of Belfast (1991-2)

Academic Positions:

• Member, EFACIS Committee (2019-)
• Member, British Association for Irish Studies International Advisory Group (2018-)
• Director, Institute of Irish Studies, QUB (2016-)
• Chair, Wiles Trustees, QUB (2010-15, 2016-)
• Head of School, School of History and Anthropology, QUB (2010-15)
• Director of Postgraduate Studies, School of History and Anthropology, QUB (2006-10)
• Director of Research (Irish History Cluster), QUB, (2005-10)
• QUB Representative on Irish Humanities Alliance Steering Group (2013-)
• AHRC Peer Review Panel Member (2010-14)
• Member, Northern Ireland Museums Council (2009-12)
• Chair, Royal Irish Academy Committee for Historical Sciences (2007-10)
• President (2007-10), Secretary (2015-16) and Committee Member (2005-present), Ulster Society for Irish Historical Studies
• Member of Editorial Board, Irish Historical Studies (2005-present)
• Member, Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences, International Assessment Panels (2004-8)
• External examiner for undergraduate degrees, NUI Galway, History (2005-8)
• External examiner, M.Stud. in Historical Research, University of Oxford (2006-9)
• External examiner for Ph.D. degrees: Maynooth University, Radboud University Nijmegen, UCC, UCD, University of Cambridge.