Professor Sean Duffy

Seán Duffy is a graduate of Trinity College Dublin, from which he also holds an M.Litt and a Ph.D. He is a Fellow of the College, where he has lectured since 1993 and is currently Professor in Medieval History. He has supervised 20 current or completed PhDs, has been been Head of Department, a member of the Board of Trinity College Dublin, and Secretary to the Fellows. He has written or edited more than 30 books and more than 40 peer-reviewed journal articles and book-chapters, has organized 27 conferences, given over 30 keynotes or international invited lectures, and served on 10 editorial or advisory boards. Since 1998 he has been Chairman of the Friends of Medieval Dublin, an influential not-for-profit advocacy organization and is much involved in pro bono consultative and advisory work on matters relating to history and heritage, particularly with Dublin City Council. Since 1999 he has organized an annual interdisciplinary conference on medieval Dublin, the proceedings of which are published each year by Four Courts Press. In 2013 he co-founded the Trinity Medieval Ireland Symposium, held biennially, the proceedings of which are published in a new Four Courts Press series, and he also a founder and organizer of prestigious biennial James Lydon Lectures in Medieval History and Culture, the volumes of which appear in a dedicated Cambridge University Press series.

  Anglo-Irish relations   Early development of Dublin   Ireland, Scotland and wales in the Middle ages   Irish History   Medieval History   Medieval Ireland   Medieval Irish & British History   Normans   Vikings

Seán Duffy has published widely on Irish history generally, and medieval Ireland in particular, on Anglo-Irish relations through the ages, on the history of the Celtic countries in the medieval period, and on history and archaeology of Dublin since the Viking Age. A cornerstone of his research has been the examination of Ireland's relations with Scotland, Wales, and the Kingdom of Man and the Isles in the Middle Ages, concentrating on the period between the battle of Clontarf in 1014 (at which perhaps the greatest of Ireland's kings, Brian Boru, was slain) and the battle of Faughart in 1318 (in which Edward, brother of Robert the Bruce was killed, the man sometimes regarded as the last king of Ireland). In his work, he has developed a transnational approach, trying to uncover the various interconnections and relationships between the medieval Celtic peoples, and re-examining the great watershed moments in their affairs. He has been particularly concerned with the response of the Irish, the Scots and the Welsh to domination by England from 1066 onwards, and especially the extent to which, after the English invasion of Ireland in 1169, Ireland's experience mirrored that of Scotland and Wales. He is currently preparing a research monograph on this largely overlooked subject for Cambridge University Press. Another research approach has been to challenge the dramatic fault-line that exists in the history of Ireland whereby there are two histories, one from the Age of St Patrick up to the Anglo-Norman Invasion in 1169, the other running from then to the modern age. His conviction that this fracture is counterproductive and undermining of insight has led him to develop a specialism which, instead of beginning or ending at 1169, uses it as a midway hinge that interlocks two historiographies traditionally kept ajar. Furthermore, even the Ireland that emerged after 1169 has itself spawned two historiographies so that one is traditionally a historian of either Gaelic Ireland or of English Ireland: Seán Duffy has sought to break down this barrier, and is regarded as a historian, not of Gaelic Ireland or of English Ireland, but offering a new integrative analysis of both. He is currently researching and writing the first major History of Medieval Ireland to appear in over half a century, to be published by Yale University Press. Another of his interests lies in the history and archaeology of Dublin from the Vikings to the Early Modern period; in 1999 he established the Medieval Dublin Symposium, an annual one-day conference that has taken place in Trinity College Dublin ever since, the proceedings of which are published in a landmark Four Courts Press series. Sixteen volumes have appeared to date, amounting to 170 papers on the subject of medieval Dublin in the 17 years since the series began, more than were written in the 170 years preceding it. He is currently researching and writing a 40,000-word history of the medieval castle of Dublin, by far this country's most important building prior to Independence.