Dr. Robert O'Sullivan will share an overview of his monograph, Nationalism, Imperialism and Anti-Slavery: The Irish-American Press in the Era of Emancipation, 1840-1865, followed by responses from Prof. Enda Delaney (University of Edinburgh), Prof. Amy Greenberg (Penn State), and Prof. Stephanie McCurry (Columbia University).
Dr. O’Sullivan’s monograph explores the writings and activism of a series of Irish-American newspaper editors and their readers, and examines how they contributed to the process by which Irish immigrant, diasporic identity took root in the United States, by engaging with political developments across the globe. In addition, the monograph assesses why the Irish-American editors rejected the American abolitionist movement and anti-slavery politics in the United States, when they were so willing to draw connections between Ireland and other areas within the 19th century imperial world and to cross the color line when drawing explicit comparisons between the Irish and other victims of global imperialism.
About Rob O'Sullivan
Robert O’Sullivan is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at The Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies. He completed his doctoral dissertation at the University of Cambridge in 2024, where he was the convenor of the Modern Irish History Seminar in the Faculty of History. Dr. O’Sullivan is a political and social historian of nineteenth-century American and Irish history. His work has been published in multiple academic journals including Irish Historical Studies, Journal of the Early Republic, and Civil War History. His research has been supported by a Kate B. and Hall J. Peterson Fellowship from the American Antiquarian Society; the William Reese Company Fellowship in American Bibliography from the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Malcolm and Mildred Freiberg Fellowship from the Massachusetts Historical Society.
Originally published at irishstudies.nd.edu.