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Biography

A graduate of the University of Dublin, I was a Junior Research Fellow in the Institute of Irish Studies, Queen's University Belfast, before being appointed a lecturer in the Dept. of Modern History. Elected a Fellow of TCD in 1990, I served as Head of the Department of Modern History from 1995 to 1998 and retired as Professor of Modern History in 2017. I am currently a Fellow Emeritus at the Trinity Long Room Hub for the period 2021-25. I served as University Registrar from 2004 to 2007, and as a member of the Governing Body of the Dublin Institute of Technology and of the Marino Institute of Education during those years and subsequently. I was elected a Member of the Royal Irish Academy in 2006. I was a founding editor of the journal 'Irish Economic and Social History', and was President of the Economic and Social History Society of Ireland from 2002 to 2008. I was also a co-founder of the African Studies Association of Ireland. I acted as PI of the PRTLI-funded Irish Scottish Studies Programme (1999-2006), and was Director of the TCD Centre for Irish-Scottish and Comparative Studies (later the TCD Centre for New Irish Studies) until 2017. I was awarded a Government of Ireland Senior Research Fellowship by the Irish Humanities and Social Science Research Council for 2002-3, and was a PI of the IRCHSS-funded 'Ireland, Empire and Education' Project between 2008 and 2010. I have published extensively on the social, economic and cultural history of Ireland in the long eighteenth century. Past collaborative research projects have included the demographic history of eighteenth-century Ireland; the comparative history of famine in Ireland; the social history of eighteenth and nineteenth-century Dublin; the 1798 Irish rebellion; and Ireland's entanglement with empire.

Research Tags

Ireland and Africa since 1870 Irish urban history, Dublin and Cork Social and economic history of Ireland 1650-1850

Research Projects

Project Title

The Moore Letters Project

From

Dec. 2012

June 2023

Summary

This project, involving a team of five editors, has as its aim the publication of a critical edition of the 830 letters of the Moore family of Derry city between the 1790s and 1840s. This remarkable collection of correspondence of a middle-class family records the two-way exchanges between siblings and close relatives based in Derry, Dublin, Westport, Baltimore, and New York, and ranges over half a century. It is highly revealing of an intensely liberal Presbyterian culture that did not survive.

Person Months

Project Title

The Irish first cities

From

2015

2019

Summary

The first cities project drew on the stand-alone research of several urban historians and culminated in a monograph that compared the development of the ten principal Irish cities between the mid-seventeenth century and the 1820s. No general work on Irish urbanization spanning this pivotal period of growth had previously been attempted. The resulting monograph (Yale, 2021) places the appearance of the first Irish cities in a European and Atlantic context and explores architectural analogies, commercial connections and political singularity. The monograph also contrasts the dynamic growth of Irish cities in the eighteenth century with their relative stagnation (in population terms) in the century after 1825, and reflects on the cultural and political legacies of the preceding era. Spin-off projects on Derry and the Atlantic and on Sligo are currently being completed.

Funding Agency

n/a

Programme

n/a

Project Type

Stand-alone monograph

Person Months

Representations

Details	Date
Governing Body, Dublin Institute of Technology, 2004-7 Governing Body, Marino Institute of Education, 2004-17 Council of the Royal Irish Academy 2015-16 Irish Manuscripts Commission 2009-17

Languages

Language	Skill Reading	Skill Writing	Skill Speaking
French	Medium	Basic	Basic

Memberships

Membership of Professional Institutions, Associations, Societies

Details	Date From	Date To
Royal Irish Academy; Economic and Social History Social of Ireland; Irish Historical Society; African Studies Association of Ireland

Publications and other Research Outputs

'Dublin' in, editor(s)Joseph Hone and Pat Rogers , Jonnathan Swift in context, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2024, pp270 - 276, [David Dickson], Book Chapter, PUBLISHED

'Setting out the terrain: Ireland and the Caribbean in the eighteenth century' in, editor(s)Finola O'Kane and Ciaran O'Neill , Ireland, slavery and the Caribbean, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2023, pp21 - 39, [David Dickson], Book Chapter, PUBLISHED

David Dickson, The First Irish Cities: An Eighteenth-Century Transformation, First, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2021, 1 - 336pp, Book, PUBLISHED

'Editorial Preface, 2020' in, editor(s)Charles Benson , The Dublin book trade, 1801-1850, 2021, Bibliographical Society, London, and The Lilliput Press, 2021, ppxiii - xv, [David Dickson], Book Chapter, PUBLISHED

David Dickson, What happened to modern Irish urban history?, Urban History, 46, (1), 2019, p10 - 20, Journal Article, PUBLISHED

David Dickson, 'Cork's new town (1780) and its afterlife', Irish Architectural and Decorative Studies, 22, 2019, p42 - 51, Journal Article, PUBLISHED

Society and economy in the long eighteenth century in, editor(s)James Kelly , The Cambridge History of Ireland, III: 1730-1880, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2018, pp153 - 178, [David Dickson], Book Chapter, PUBLISHED

'Town and city' in, Eugenio F. Biagini & Mary E. Daly , The Cambridge social history of modern Ireland, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2017, pp112 - 128, [David Dickson], Book Chapter, PUBLISHED

'"Seven sisters?" The seaport cities of mid-eighteenth century Ireland' in, Thomas M. Truxes , Ireland, France and the Atlantic in a time of war, Abington, Routledge, 2017, pp93 - 107, [David Dickson], Book Chapter, PUBLISHED

'Novel spectacle? The birth of the Whiteboys, 1761-2' in, D.W. Hayton & Andrew R. Holmes, , Ourselves Alone? Religion, society and politics in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ireland: Essays presented to S.J. Connolly, Dublin, Four Courts, 2016, pp61 - 83, [David Dickson], Book Chapter, PUBLISHED

Page 1 of 5

'Best of times, worst of time' in, editor(s)Djinn von Noorden , Malton's views of Dublin: The story of a Georgian city, Dublin, Martello Publishing, 2021, pp85 - 89, [David Dickson], Book Chapter, PUBLISHED

Foreword in, editor(s)C.J. Woods , Charles Abbot's tour through Ireland and North Wales in 1792, Dublin, Edmund Burke Publishers, 2019, ppvii - ix, [David Dickson], Book Chapter, PUBLISHED

'Foreword' in, editor(s)Young, Amy Mabel , 'Three hundred years in Innishowen, being... an account of the Young family of Culdaff, Dublin, Edmund Burke, 2018, ppv - ix, [David Dickson], Book Chapter, PUBLISHED

Awards and Honours

Award	Date
Winner of the 2005 J. S. Donnelly sr. History Book Prize, American Conference for Irish Studies, for 'Old world colony: Cork and South Munster 1630-1830' . Elected a Member of the Royal Irish Academy in 2006

Research Interests

Description Of Research Interests

GENERAL INTERESTS: Social and economic history of Ireland; the history of Irish cities; Ireland and colonial Africa; the environmental history of Ireland and Scotland. CURRENT RESEARCH: 'The Moore project': the preparation of an annotated edition of the extensive correspondence of a middle-class Derry family between the 1790s and the 1840s, conducted with their siblings and relatives in Dublin, Baltimore and beyond. Sligo and its hinterland in the century 1760-1860.

Trinity College Dublin, The University of Dublin

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Professor David Dickson