Ian Burns offers updates on his work on twentieth-century Irish volunteerism and the nationalist community in the years prior to the First World War.

What is your field and level of study?
I am a Ph.D. candidate specializing in modern Irish history and the history of the British empire.

Tell us why you decided to pursue your chosen field of study.
This is hard to pin down; however, I feel a calling to this field—a personal pull toward this intellectual pursuit.

What have been your most rewarding experiences during your studies? Your most challenging?
By far the most rewarding aspect of graduate study in Irish history is finding success during archival research. There is a great sense of achievement in the creative process of writing history from those sources, and especially in dissertation progress. I also enjoy immensely the sense of community and common calling most evident within the American Conference for Irish Studies, as well as in my department at Northern Illinois. I find the periodic solitude and ups and downs of self-motivation that are inherent in research and writing to be the greatest challenges of graduate work.

What are you currently working on?
I am just over a semester into writing my dissertation on Irish nationalist volunteerism in the early twentieth century. I recently returned from a research trip to Dublin’s archives and am currently working with new sources from that trip. In the immediate future I hope to have the opportunity to rework my first completed chapter on the Howth Gunrunning and Bachelor’s Walk Affair into an article.

What are you currently reading?
I’m reading Padraig Yeates’s A City in Wartime: Dublin 1914–1918 and have recently started Dangerous Waters: The Life and Death of Erskine Childers by Leonard Piper.

How do you hope to contribute to Irish Studies?
In some sense I think we are still far removed from understanding the motivations, the draw, the energy and the emotion involved in being a part of the Irish nationalist volunteer community during third Home Rule period and throughout the opening years of the First World War. I hope to be able to add something to our understanding of this period—humanizing the women and men who devoted their free time, their passion, even their lives to these organizations and their goals. I hope to have the opportunity to inspire interest in twentieth-century Irish history, particularly in the relatively understudied period immediately preceding the Easter Rising.

What are your future plans?
I anticipate finishing my dissertation in the next twelve (or so) months. In the longer run I hope to have the opportunity to pursue an academic career, teaching modern European history and pursuing my own research and writing interests at the university level.