I am an Assistant Professor in Irish History and Director of the MA History of Family. I am a historian of the family, gender and sexuality, and my work focuses on Presbyterian families in Ireland and North America across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I have published extensively on Irish family life on topics including courtship, sex and the making of marriage; illegitimacy and the family; youth and adolescence; marriage and marital breakdown; siblinghood; the material culture of sex; fatherhood and pregnancy; and queer approaches to the Irish family.

Before joining the University of Limerick, I taught History at the University of Hertfordshire and Queen’s University, Belfast. Between 2016 and 2017, I was the postdoctoral researcher on the AHRC-funded project ‘Bad Bridget: Criminal and Deviant Irish Women in North America, 1838-1918’, co-led by Professor Elaine Farrell (Queen’s University, Belfast) and Professor Leanne McCormick (Ulster University).

I have two books in progress that extend understandings of family life in Ireland through an exploration of Presbyterian sources. My book, Promiscuous Presbyterians: Family Life in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Ulster, is under contract with the Royal Irish Academy. This book tells the story of family life in eighteenth and nineteenth century Ulster through the prism of the Presbyterian community. Brought over to Ireland in the early seventeenth-century by Scottish settlers, Presbyterianism soon established itself as the largest religious grouping in the province of Ulster. Drawing on a combination of personal papers, diaries and correspondence belonging to Presbyterian families, as well as records produced by the Presbyterian church courts, this book casts light on the everyday experiences of women and men who lived, loved, and laboured in Ireland.

My second book grows out of my externally funded project, ‘Sexuality and Social Control: Presbyterians in Ireland and North America, 1717-1830’. This project explores the relationship between sexuality, religion and migration. It focuses on Presbyterians and investigates the ways that Presbyterian sexuality was policed in Ireland and North America, across the eighteenth- and early nineteenth- centuries. Salacious stories of stolen trysts in backrooms, fields and forests; misbehaving ministers riding on horseback, seducing the wives of their church members; and promiscuous Presbyterian youths sneaking around behind the backs of their elders form the basis of this project. What did Presbyterian women and men in past centuries get up to under the sheets? At what point did sexual activity become illicit? How different were Presbyterian communities in Ireland and North America? In tracing this aspect of Presbyterian life, this project asks what we can learn about the family by placing sex and sexuality at the core of our research.

This project is funded by several awarding bodies, including:

• British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant Scheme
• Research Fellowship from the Presbyterian Historical Society, Philadelphia (USA)
• Women's History Association of Ireland, Anna Parnell Travel Grant
• R.J. Hunter Bursary from the Royal Irish Academy

My interests in family life in Ireland led to the creation of RIFNET: Reconstituting the Irish Family Research Network, a major international research collaboration that I co-conceived and co-led with Dr Maeve O’Riordan (UCC). Funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and the Irish Research Council, RIFNET aimed to tell the story of Irish families that sit outside of what we perceive as the ‘traditional’ norm. The network brought together academic researchers, museum and heritage professionals, and members of the public to re-examine meanings of family in Ireland both past and present.

In addition to the publication of a special issue (2024) that sets ‘A New Agenda for the Irish Family’, the project produced a series of impactful engagement activities with the general public. In April 2022, RIFNET held an object storytelling event at the National Museum of Ireland to capture stories of LGBTQ+ family life in Ireland. The outputs of this event – a digital exhibition of objects and oral histories, have created an invaluable learning resource for members of the public and scholars of the Irish family, https://rifnet.org/. Working with the Digital Repository of Ireland, we also ensured that our collection would be permanently preserved and accessible to the wider public, https://repository.dri.ie/catalog/tb09xz88b

Research Interests

History of the family and its relationships; the Life Cycle; Women and Gender in eighteenth and nineteenth century Ireland; History of Emotions; Sexualities; Presbyterianism

I welcome expressions of interest from potential doctoral students in these areas.

Teaching

I currently lead the following modules:

MA History of Family

• Introduction to History of Family
• Linking Families to Communities
• People on the Move: Studying Migration

Undergraduate History

• Sex, Scandal & Sin: Negotiating Deviancies in Ireland and North America.

Research Supervision

Ph.D.

• Annie Bussell, 'Regulating Prostitution in the Three Towns: a comparative study of policing responses to prostitution and its related problems, in Plymouth, Devonport and Stonehouse, 1850-1914' (University of Hertfordshire)
• Sarah-Jayne Clements, 'Breaking Barriers. Disability Inclusion in Archaeology’

MRes

• Kiran Seera, ''Domestic Disorder: Crime, Kinship, and Space in Bedfordshire, c. 1650-1790' (completed 2024, University of Hertfordshire).
• Alexandra Brown, 'Fidelity and the concept of male faithfulness in Georgian Relationships, 1714-1830' (completed 2024, University of Hertfordshire).