ProfessorDeirdre Raftery

Deirdre Raftery is Full Professor of the History of Education at UCD School of Education, and an elected Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. 
She was awarded the CHWS Distinguished Historian Award (USA) in 2019. Deirdre Raftery's most recent book publications are: Irish Nuns and Education in the Anglophone World: a Transnational History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024);  Deirdre Raftery and Stephanie Spencer (eds), Intersectionality, Transnationalism, and the History of Education (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024); New Turns in the History of Education in Ireland (Routledge, 2023); Teresa Ball and Loreto Education: Convents and the Colonial World, 1794-1875 (Four Courts Press, 2022); and (jointly): Nano Nagle, the Life and the Legacy (IAP, 2019). Other books include: Transnationalism, Gender and the History of Education (Routeldge, 2017); Education, Identity and Women Religious, 1800-1950 (Routledge, 2016); Educating Ireland: Schools and Society, 1700-2000 (IAP, 2014), and History of Education: Themes and Perspectives (Routledge, 2013).
She was a Barker Research Fellow, at the University of Durham (2024). She now holds a Visiting Fellowship at the University of Cambridge, in addition to a Visiting Fellowship at the History Department of the University of Galway. She is also Visting Research Fellow at Trinity College Dublin (2025).

Her work funded by the Ireland-Canada University Foundation (University of Toronto, 2014), and the Fulbright Foundation (Boston College, 2015), expanded her groundbreaking research into women religious as part of the nineteenth-century Irish diaspora. Her IRC-funded DIASPORAEd project examined the role of the Irish female diaspora in nineteenth century schooling in Australia, where she was hosted by La Trobe University (2014), and worked at archival collections in Melbourne, Sydney and Ballarat. She has expanded this research, using archives in India, Newfoundland and the American Midwest, for her new book (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). Most recently, she spent time at archives in Sydney, Australia for her work on the education of the Irish poor in nineteenth century Australia and Tasmania.

Her areas of specialisation are: nineteenth century education; university and higher education of women in England and Ireland in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; education and the Irish diaspora in the nineteenth century; convent schooling for girls; education and development in the Global South.In 2019-2020, she was invited to become Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Toronto, and Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Notre Dame, USA.

Deirdre publishes and supervises research in the history of education; gender and education; church-state relations; education ideas; and digital humanities, and she leads several funded research projects on the history of women religious (nuns) and education. In addition to supervising several doctoral scholars and masters students, she is module coordinator for all of the history of education modules in the School of Education.
Deirdre Raftery was Fulbright Scholar in the Humanities (2015-2016), at Boston College. She was a Visiting Fellow of the University of Oxford in 2010, and is a Life Member of the University of Cambridge. She has won several Irish Research Council awards, and currently has two fully-funded Post-Doctoral Fellows working with her at UCD.  She has undertaken research in many parts of Europe, North America, Australia, and South East Asia. 

In addition to writing, research and lecturing, she routinely advises on the history of convents and schools, contributing to television, radio, film and documentaries.

Deirdre Raftery was joint editor of the Taylor and Francis international SScI-indexed History of Education, for five years, and she serves on the Editorial Boards of History of Education, History of Education and Children's Literature, International Journal of the Historiography of Education, and Espacio, Tiempo y Educacion.

Deirdre Raftery has given many invited addresses and invited keynote lectures around the world, at universities including the University of Zurich, University of Melbourne, Humboldt University, the University of London, Santa Clara University, San Francisco, Goethe University, Frankfurt, the University of Notre Dame), Dublin City University, and Trinity College Dublin, the University of Galway, and the University of Cambridge.