Fr. Rafferty of Boston College provides us with a glimpse at his current reading list, plus a preview of more publications to come.

Area of Research
My area of research is essentially church-state relations in Britain and Ireland in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but I’m also quite interested in the history of the development of Catholicism since the Thirty Year’s War.

What are you currently working on?
At present, I’m working on a book on the Catholic church in Ireland and the 1916 Rising. I’m also finishing the index for a book to be published by Four Courts Press later in the fall, and that is Politics, Violence and Catholicism in Ireland.

What are you currently reading?
Roy Foster’s Vivid Faces; Rory Muir’s magnificent book on Wellington; my colleague Rob Savage’s The BBC’s “Irish Troubles”; Brendan Bradshaw’s recent collection And So Began the Irish Nation, and then, I suppose because I’m now living in America, I’ve almost finished Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman. I’ve also just begun to read Paul Murray’s latest novel, The Mark and the Void.

Bibliography of recent work

Irish Catholic Identities. Paperback ed. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015.

“The British Government and the Appointment of Tomás Ó Fiaich as Archbishop of Armagh.” Seanchas Ard Mhacha 25 (2014): 27-62.

“The Tomistic Revival and the Relationship between the Jesuits and the Papacy, 1878–1914.” Theological Studies 75:4 (2014): 743-73.

“The Catholic Church, Violence and the Nationalist Struggles in Ireland, 1798-1998,” in Religion and Violence, ed. Gabriel Ricci, 65-85. New Jersey: Transaction Publications, 2014.