Muiris MacGiollabhuí is the 2016 recipient of the Larkin Research Fellowship in Irish Studies, offered to graduate students working on Irish history or social sciences. The competition for the Larkin fellowship is open to candidates training at a North American university, and the application deadline is in late fall or early winter.

I have been lucky enough to have been awarded the Larkin fellowship for 2016 which will help me finish a project that has been in the works for almost four years. I graduated from UCD in Ireland with a BA in history in 2011 and from the minute I finished, I knew that a career in academia was the right for me. I moved to California in 2012 to pursue a PhD at the University of California, Santa Cruz, which, although hard work, has been the best decision of my life. Doctoral theses and beaches aren’t usually compatible. Originally, I came to Santa Cruz enthused with the Irish experience in the American southwest through the mid-nineteenth century, especially the San Patricios who fought for the Mexican Army in the U.S.-Mexican War, but over time, it was the United Irishmen who fascinated me most, and the eventual focus of my PhD dissertation. Outside of academia, my passions include soccer, cycling, swimming, and reading. Right now I’m reading Fergus Whelan’s new biography of Archibald H. Rowan and Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings.

The intention of my project for the Larkin fellowship is to construct the Atlantic history of the United Irishmen from 1795 until 1830 that understands them less as Irish revolutionaries, and more as revolutionaries from Ireland who exist within an increasingly subversive Atlantic World. Their exile, which occurred in advance of the larger Irish diaspora of the nineteenth century, brought them north to Newfoundland and south into the armies of Simon Bolívar. In the West Indies they could be found living among Jamaican Maroons, and in the American south they became entrenched in the plantocracy. The United Irishmen and the diversity of their experiences provide the opportunity to understand the contradictions and continuities that exemplified a revolutionary Atlantic World. More than France or the American Colonies, which often dominate discussions of the revolutionary period, the United Irishmen found themselves in the Caribbean during the Haitian Revolution, and in Latin America during the Wars of Liberation. As such, using the United Irishmen as our focal point, and their revolutionary ideology as a lens, we can start to understand the “Age of Revolution” as a more expansive Atlantic phenomenon, and not one grounded simply in Europe or North America.