ProfessorTadhg O' Hannrachain

My principal research interests are in the history of Early Modern Ireland and the European Counter-Reformation. Between 2008 and 2011 I was the joint principal investigator in the IRCHSS-funded project, Insular Christianity. The goal of the project was to break down some of the barriers between the study of confessional or national groups, and to encourage the study of religious history in the widest senses, from the theological to the social, from visual culture to political engagement. As such it targeted particular themes and topics, ripe for collaborative investigation, and with wider resonances within and beyond these islands. At the heart of the project was the development of a scholarly network which focused on three successive symposia, 'Catholic and Presbyterian: alternative establsihments' (Spring 2009), 'Celtic Christianities: appropriations and adaptations' (Spring 2010) and 'The Early Modern Bible: Controversy, Exegisis and Diffusion (2011), the last of these coinciding with the quatercentenary of the publication of the King James Bible, held in Dublin in successive years. The symposia were not standard academic conference. Firstly, the papers, commissioned in advance, were intended to stand mid-way between the standard, specialized conference paper or journal article, and the textbook-style overview. Secondly, the papers were submitted in advance, and ciruclated to all other participants in a closed website, to allow for comment and exchange of views in advance of the symposium itself which allowed participants to benefit from the expertise of colleagues working adjacent fields or in a different national context. The first volume to emerge from this project, Insular Christianity: alternative models of the Church in Britain and Ireland c. 1570 c. 1700 (Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2012) appeared at the end of 2012. The second volume, Christianities in the Early Modern Celtic World was published by Palgrave in 2014. The third volume, The English Bible in the Early Modern World will appear from Brill in 2016. My monograph Catholic Europe, 1592-1648: Centre and Periphery was published by Oxford University Press in October 2015. My current research projects are to finish a book on Catholic narrative histories of the 1640s, to continue my work on the comparative history of the inculcation of religious change in Habsburg Hungary and Stuart Ireland, and to begin a new project on confessional migration in Early Modern Europe. I am currently mentoring a post-doctoral fellow,Sean Smith, whose research project is entitled "Succeeding the Jesuits: politics, piety and the Congregation of the Mission in eighteenth century Europe" and which re-evaluates the suppression of the Jesuits in terms of an internal restructuring of European Catholicism.