2025 marks twenty years since the RIA and the Higher Education Authority established the Gold Medals to acclaim Ireland’s foremost thinkers in the humanities, social sciences, and across the fields of science. The Gold Medals have become the ultimate accolade in scholarly achievement in Ireland. Since 2005, 34 medals have been awarded. In recognition of this important milestone, past RIA Gold Medals recipients have contributed blogs focusing on their research to our Members’ Research Series.
Cormac Ó Gráda MRIA, is an economic historian and professor emeritus of economics at University College Dublin. He was awarded the RIA Gold Medal in the Humanities in 2010.
Aoibhinn beatha an scoláire
Bhíos ag déanamh léighinn;
Is follus díbh a dhaoine
Gur dó is aoibhne in Éirinn.
The first quatrain of that happy seventeenth-century poem still rings true for me. I am an economic historian—an economist by training and a self-taught historian. Over a long career, the focus of my work has shifted from an initial concentration on IrelandFootnote 1 to topics such as the global history of famine and the British industrial revolution. I have nearly always had a few irons in the fire at any one time.
As befits an economic historian, I have written several solo-authored monographs and published many papers—co-authored and solo-authored—in a broad range of journals. A major current preoccupation is seeing through to publication a new monograph The hidden victims: civilian casualties of the two World WarsFootnote 2. This is both a quantitative and a narrative account of the many ways in which civilians suffered and died during those conflicts. The calculations put the civilian death toll in the two wars at sixty million, or slightly more. Famines were responsible for more than half of the deaths; and half of those who died were civilians of Russia or the USSR.
The book ends on the downbeat note, not without its resonances in 2024, that ‘when push comes to shove, attempts to spare civilians by humanising war fall terribly short’. It is being launched in the Academy on 22 October 2024.
I am also approaching the end of a collaboration with two US-based epidemiologists about the impact of foetal exposure during famines on the prevalence of schizophrenia and Type 2 diabetes. This project is mainly concerned with correcting a common misconception, typified by claims that the high rate of mental illness in Ireland until recently, and of diabetes in present day China, were the product of foetal exposure during major famines in the 1840s and in 1959–61, respectively. While the evidence that foetal exposure makes people more vulnerable to those diseases is robust, its impact on their incidence in the broader population has been greatly exaggerated by some. So far, this project has yielded two papers, my firsts in medical journalsFootnote 3.
Two more ongoing collaborations refer to different aspects of Irish emigration and immigration. One is an analysis, using probate and infant mortality data, of how Irish immigrants and their descendants fared in England over the past century and a half. ‘Not great’ until recently, is the short answer.
The other is a study of Irish returnees from the United States over a century ago. It identifies a sample through their having co-resident, US-born children present in their household, as recorded in the online 1911 census, from which my co-author ‘scraped’ the data. The research addresses the selectivity of the returnees. Working draft versions of both studies can easily be found onlineFootnote 4.
Finally, for several years two co-authors and I have been working on a new history of the British industrial revolution for Princeton University Press. In a well-trodden field, the novelty lies in our heavy focus on the role of human capital in the form of artisanal skills, particularly skills associated with working with metals. In addition to other advantages, Britain was well endowed with such human capital and with the coal and iron that spawned it. Moreover, its higher living standards before industrialisation made for healthier and savvier workers. Such advantages, we argue, gave it a head start. A flavour of our work so far may be obtained in journal articles we have already publishedFootnote 5.
2025 marks twenty years since the RIA and the Higher Education Authority established the Gold Medals to acclaim Ireland’s foremost thinkers in the humanities, social sciences, and across the fields of science. The Gold Medals have become the ultimate accolade in scholarly achievement in Ireland. Since 2005, 34 medals have been awarded. In recognition of this important milestone, past RIA Gold Medals recipients have contributed blogs focusing on their research to our Members’ Research Series.
Fergus Shanahan MRIA, is a gastroenterologist and emeritus professor of medicine at University College Cork. He was awarded the RIA Gold Medal in the Life Sciences in 2016.
I have been privileged with a career in medicine that has allowed me to be a clinician–scientist, a teacher, a researcher, an entrepreneur and an author. I have also been privileged to work with talented people at home and abroad who helped me pursue my curiosities. In 2016 the Royal Irish Academy (RIA) awarded me a gold medal for achievements in life sciences.
For me, this award was more than an acknowledgement of my earlier research, it was a stimulus to undertake ambitious projects that I had been postponing and might never have undertaken without such encouragement. The best was yet to come!
As the foundation director of the APC Microbiome Ireland research centre, I had explored how personal microbes in the gut—collectively known as the microbiome—affect health and disease. My colleagues and I had achieved considerable recognition for studying the microbiome in a diversity of human cohorts, including the young and the elderly, professional athletes, and patients with inflammatory bowel disease and irritable bowel syndrome. We thought we had assembled a comprehensive profile of the Irish microbiome. A longstanding curiosity with the traditional lives of Irish Travellers, however, led me to ask whether their distinct ethnicity and bygone ways might have influenced their microbiome. No one could have anticipated that we would discover that the Irish Travellers—an ethnic minority in a modern industrialised country—would have an ancient, non-industrialised type of microbiome.
The research was published in Nature Medicine (2020), accompanied by an editorial on its global implications for everyone; particularly all minority groups, including migrants. The microbiome of Irish Travellers challenges restrictive definitions of a healthy microbiome in a pluralistic society. Non-industrialised microbiomes are associated with a reduced risk of allergies and chronic immunological disorders, and lower rates of antimicrobial resistance. Moreover, the microbiome of Irish Travellers represents a model for exploring how modern life affects the microbiome, and its link with health and disease.
I have always been convinced that the quality of research is enhanced by engaging with the study population before undertaking the research. Our work with the Irish Travellers was a true collaboration, from design to execution. By engaging with the Travellers, we were better equipped to ask the right questions and to interrogate our data. Effective engagement has also fostered mutual trust and continuing research.
The gold medal award from the RIA invigorated me to complete several other projects that might otherwise have languished. One of these was to provide a public health service by explaining to society the significance of our work on the microbiome. How does one present microbiome science to all members of society, of varying ages and education levels? To address this challenge, I collaborated with a graphic artist, Laura Gowers, to tell the story of microbes in the human gut—from the perspective of the microbes themselves!
Since the best way to understand a microbe is to imagine how a microbe might think, we allow the microbes tell their story from the birth of their human host to the end of human life. Brevity, humour, and beautiful imagery are used to illustrate the majesty of the microbiome.
For those seeking more details, we present QR codes with the images, to direct viewers to additional online content. The result is a book for the lay public entitled Listen to your microbes—a graphic story from their perspective (Liberties Press, 2023), supplemented with online information at a YouTube channel of same name. We now plan to animate the imagery from the book to create a free, movie version of the story for everyone.
2025 marks twenty years since the RIA and the Higher Education Authority established the Gold Medals to acclaim Ireland’s foremost thinkers in the humanities, social sciences, and across the fields of science. The Gold Medals have become the ultimate accolade in scholarly achievement in Ireland. Since 2005, 34 medals have been awarded. In recognition of this important milestone, past RIA Gold Medals recipients have contributed blogs focusing on their research to our Members’ Research Series.
David N. Livingstone MRIA, is professor emeritus of geography at the School of Natural and Built Environment, Queen’s University Belfast. He was awarded the RIA Gold Medal in the Social Sciences in 2008.
A good deal of my research dwells on connections between the history of ideas and geographical thought. While I was still in school, an extraordinary English teacher first opened up to me the power of ideas, not least in literature, to change the world. I found it exhilarating. Later, as an undergraduate student in geography, I was captivated by a two-year course on the history of ideas about nature and culture since ancient times. Since then, I’ve devoted a good deal of my time to thinking about space and thought in one way or another.
My first book, Nathaniel Southgate Shaler and the culture of American science (University of Alabama Press, 1987) grew out of my doctoral thesis and focused on the life and thought of an American earth scientist and public intellectual in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. It became clear to me that Shaler’s science could not be divorced from the wider social and political context within which he worked at Harvard in the half-century or so after the American Civil War. So, I found my way into the history of ideas about race relations and scientific inquiry, about the destruction of natural resources, about the connections between science and religion, and about science and social thought. While putting the finishing touches to that volume, I began writing another book—Darwin’s forgotten defenders (Scottish Academic Press & Eerdmans, 1987) —which examined the surprisingly positive evaluations of Darwinian evolution by a significant number of prominent religious believers at the time, both in Britain and America. This alerted me to the ways in which history can be radically different from what people presume must have been the case.
What would science itself look like when examined from a geographical perspective? Science was conventionally taken to be a placeless enterprise, devoid of local particularities, and trading in universal truths. But was that in fact the case? What role did place and space play in the production and circulation of scientific knowledge?
Over the next few years, I worked on a history of geographical ideas that culminated in The geographical tradition: episodes in the history of a contested enterprise (Blackwell, 1992). What I wanted to do here was to write a history of geographical knowledge that engaged with currents of thought in intellectual history and the history of science. Most of the geographical histories available at that stage seemed to me to proceed in isolation from wider historiographical considerations. Around that time, it struck me that there was another side to all of this. What would science itself look like when examined from a geographical perspective? Science was conventionally taken to be a placeless enterprise, devoid of local particularities, and trading in universal truths. But was that in fact the case? What role did place and space play in the production and circulation of scientific knowledge? I tried to answer that question in Putting science in its place: geographies of scientific knowledge (University of Chicago Press, 2003), which has been translated into Japanese, Korean and Chinese. In the years that followed, I wrote a couple of other books: one dwelt on the cultural politics of human origin theories— Adam’s ancestors: race, religion and the politics of human origins (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); another, based on my Gifford Lectures for 2014, focused on the role of location in shaping dialogues between religion and Darwinism—Dealing with Darwin: place, politics and rhetoric in religious engagements with evolution (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014).
My hope is to … [alert] readers to the consequences of climate determinism in relation to race, empire, health, wealth, and war in the past… [and] the toxic directions in which the climatic interpretation of history can all too easily drift.
To bring the story up to date, I have just published a book on the history of ideas about climate: The empire of climate: a history of an idea (Princeton University Press, 2024). My interest here is in probing the ways in which climate has often been taken to determine everything from human health and the decline of civilisation to the advent of war and the afflictions of the modern psyche. What has animated my interest in this subject is the way in which scientists, journalists and politicians routinely instruct us on the inevitable ramifications of changed climatic conditions for human life. These contemporary concerns turn out to have a lengthy and sometimes dark history, especially in the West. My hope for this book is that by alerting readers to the consequences of climate determinism in relation to race, empire, health, wealth and war in the past, I might provide some warnings about the toxic directions in which the climatic interpretation of history can all too easily drift.
2025 marks twenty years since the RIA and the Higher Education Authority established the Gold Medals to acclaim Ireland’s foremost thinkers in the humanities, social sciences, and across the fields of science. The Gold Medals have become the ultimate accolade in scholarly achievement in Ireland. Since 2005, 34 medals have been awarded. In recognition of this important milestone, past RIA Gold Medals recipients have contributed blogs focusing on their research to our Members’ Research Series.
Mary E. Daly MRIA, professor emeritus of Irish History, University College Dublin. She was awarded the RIA Gold Medal in the Humanities in 2020.
An implicit, and sometimes explicit, research question in much of my work, is what features of Ireland’s history are exceptional? A second motivation has often been filling gaps in that history and discovering archival sources.
My research has concentrated on Ireland since the famine, with a focus on social and economic history; it has been informed by looking at developments in other countries. My MA by research, published as Dublin: the deposed capital, 1860–1914 (Cork University Press, 1984), gave me an abiding interest in studying poverty, illness and housing, topics further explored in The buffer state: the historical roots of the Department of the Environment (IPA Dublin, 1997), and various articles. Other recurring themes are economic development, emigration and population decline. Industrial development and Irish national identity, 1922–39 (Syracuse University Press, 1992) examined the efforts of the new state to develop the economy while preserving what it regarded as essential features of Irishness—small farms, rural living, native industries and jobs for men, not women.
An implicit, and sometimes explicit, research question in much of my work, is what features of Ireland’s history are exceptional?
I explored the interplay between Catholic and nationalist ideologies and socio-economic policies in greater depth in The slow failure: population decline and independent Ireland, 1920–1973 (University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), and in Sixties Ireland: reshaping the economy, state and society, 1957–1973 (Cambridge University Press, 2016), which cast a critical eye on the years often seen as the golden age, when the economy and society were transformed. In 1961 Ireland had, by a considerable margin, the highest fertility of married women in the world. My 2023 book, The battle to control fertility in modern Ireland (Cambridge University Press), sought to explain this, and why the battle for legal contraception was so fraught and protracted. This is another instance in which Irish society sought to modernise, while retaining what it regarded as essential features of Irishness. Catholicism is an important part of it, but not the sole factor.
Women feature prominently in many of these topics. I have published articles on women’s history, but I prefer to integrate women into the wider story, not least because, as my most recent book suggests, we need to look more closely at men.
Women feature prominently in many of these topics. I have published articles on women’s history, but I prefer to integrate women into the wider story, not least because, as my most recent book suggests, we need to look more closely at men.
Teaching modern Irish history at UCD, where there was a determination to inform students about the history of Ireland since independence, had a major influence on my research, as did decades of interaction with many wonderful graduate students. A social and economic history of Ireland from 1800 (Educational Company, 1981) and The Famine in Ireland (Dublin Historical Association, 1986) were both written with students in mind, as was The Cambridge social history of modern Ireland (Cambridge University Press, 2017), which I co-edited with Eugenio Biagini.
My research career has been disrupted by a variety of academic leadership roles, including that of president of the Royal Irish Academy. During those times I found it difficult to complete a monograph, so I concentrated on editing and writing articles. I made it a rule to always have some research project underway. My current project could be described as micro-history—it’s a study of a provincial Irish town in the 1930s.
As to whether Ireland was/is exceptional, the answer, as ever with history, is complex. Many aspects of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ireland that are popularly regarded as unique can be found in other European countries—but you need to look beyond Britain.
2025 marks twenty years since the RIA and the Higher Education Authority established the Gold Medals to acclaim Ireland’s foremost thinkers in the humanities, social sciences, and across the fields of science. The Gold Medals have become the ultimate accolade in scholarly achievement in Ireland. Since 2005, 34 medals have been awarded. In recognition of this important milestone, past RIA Gold Medals recipients have contributed blogs focusing on their research to our Members’ Research Series.
I have been gradually pursuing the phenomenon of Platonism back to its roots…. meditating on the process by which Plato’s rather open-ended philosophizing solidified, over the centuries, into a fairly rigid scholastic structure.
John Dillon MRIA, Regius Professor of Greek (Emeritus), Trinity College Dublin. He was awarded the RIA Gold Medal in the Humanities in 2005.
I am by training a Classical scholar rather than a philosopher, so that my area of expertise might be reckoned as belonging more to the history of ideas than to philosophy proper. I have also taken an interest in, and down the years written a number of articles on, the role and status of the philosopher in ancient Greco-Roman society, and on other aspects of Classical antiquity.
For my doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley, I turned my attention to an obscure and much-maligned Neoplatonist philosopher, the Syrian Iamblichus of Chalcis, and produced an edition of the fragments of his Platonic commentaries, which was published by Brill in 1973. Over the years, with the co-operation of colleagues, I produced editions of various of his other works: On the Pythagorean way of life, with Jackson Hershbell (SBL, 1991); De anima, with John Finamore (Brill, 2002); De mysteriis, with Emma Clarke and Jackson Hershbell (Brill, 2004); and Iamblichus of Chalcis: the letters, with Wolfgang Polleichner (SBL, 2009).
My chief area of research is in the philosophy of Plato and the development of the Platonic tradition of philosophy, extending from his immediate successors in the so-called ‘Old Academy’, through the period of ‘Middle Platonism’, dating from around 80 bc to ad 240, to the ‘Neoplatonic’ period and beyond, into the Middle Ages and Renaissance. My study titled The heirs of Plato (OUP, 2003) deals with the ‘Old Academy’, and I have also published The Middle Platonists (Duckworth, 1977; 2nd edn 1996).
Over the years, I have also developed a great interest in the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria (c. 25 bc–ad 50), who was much influenced by Platonism, and on whom I have written two books: Two treatises of Philo of Alexandria (with David Winston; Brown University, 1983), and Philo of Alexandria: on the life of Abraham (with Ellen Birnbaum; Brill 2019), as well as in the Christian philosopher Origen of Alexandria (fl. c. ad 220). A selection of my articles has been published in three volumes by Ashgate Publishing (The golden chain, 1990; The great tradition, 1997; and The Platonic heritage, 2012).
It will be noted, from the chronological order of the works listed above, that I have actually moved backwards through the Platonic tradition in my choice of topics, and this reflects the fact that I have been gradually pursuing the phenomenon of Platonism back to its roots, trying to throw light on the more obscure parts of that tradition, and in general meditating on the process by which Plato’s rather open-ended philosophising solidified, over the centuries, into a fairly rigid scholastic structure. Indeed, I have made that question the subject of my most recent book, The roots of Platonism (CUP, 2019). I argued in The heirs of Plato that the development of Platonism as a philosophical system might be most plausibly credited to Xenocrates, the third head of the Academy after Plato, in the late fourth century bc, but was subject to modification in later ages by the assimilation of aspects of both Aristotelian and Stoic philosophy, and I would still stand over that.
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2025 marks twenty years since the RIA and the Higher Education Authority established the Gold Medals to acclaim Ireland’s foremost thinkers in the humanities, social sciences, and across the fields of science. The Gold Medals have become the ultimate accolade in scholarly achievement in Ireland. Since 2005, 34 medals have been awarded. In recognition of this important milestone, past RIA Gold Medals recipients have contributed blogs focusing on their research to our Members’ Research Series.
Jane Ohlmeyer MRIA, Erasmus Smith’s Professor of Modern History (1762) at Trinity College Dublin (TCD), was Trinity’s first vice-president for Global Relations (2011–14), director of the Trinity Long Room Hub (2015–20), and chair of the Irish Research Council (2015–21). She was awarded the RIA Gold Medal in the Humanities in 2023.
I am an expert on the New British and Atlantic histories and have published extensively on early modern Irish and British history. I am author or editor of more than 40 peer-reviewed articles and 14 books, published with leading international publishers such as Yale University Press, Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press and Manchester University Press. Some of these publications have involved major fundraising and a level of teamwork rarely found in the humanities. In 2023 I received an Advanced European Research Council Award for VOICES, a project that aims to recover the lived experiences of women in early modern Ireland, and was awarded the Royal Irish Academy Gold Medal in the Humanities.
My most recent book, Making empire: Ireland, imperialism and the early modern world (Oxford, 2023), is based on lectures I delivered at the University of Oxford in 2021 for the prestigious James Ford Lectures in British and Irish History series.
In Making empire I wanted to do four things. First, to re-examine empire as process—and Ireland’s role in it—through the lens of early modernity (c. 1550–1750). In so doing the book offers, as David Armitage noted in his 13 January 2024 review in the Times Literary Supplement, ‘a model for deprovincializing any national history under the long shadow of empire’. What becomes clear is that imperialism was not a single occurrence but an iterative and durable process that impacted different parts of Ireland at different times and in different ways. That imperialism was about the exercise of power, violence, coercion, expropriation and ‘othering’. According to Sir Hilary Beckles, the leading historian of the Caribbean, ‘Ireland is now a prime site for the re-examination of the complexity of racism and the hatred it houses’.
It is a timely moment to reflect on the legacies of empires. Events that occurred in early modern Ireland remain very much part of the DNA and are core to the identity of people living in Ireland today. Until recently few fully appreciated the significance of Ireland’s imperial past, but this is changing and there is a growing awareness of the importance of informed discussion and respectful debate.
Second, I wanted to move beyond the ‘colonised’/‘coloniser’ stereotypes, and so the book recognises the agency of marginal people especially women, from all ethnic and religious backgrounds, who were often the social glue that held together families and communities. This exploration of more everyday issues—landholding and labour as well as material culture and money-lending—and the emphasis on assimilation, however, does not diminish the endemic violence and intense warfare or the expropriation and exploitation that characterised early modern Ireland. My ERC VOICES project, where the focus is on the lived experiences of non-elite women, develops further the role women played in colonial Ireland.
Third, I wanted Making empire to demonstrate how people from Ireland, both Catholics and Protestants, were agents of the British and other early modern empires. They were trans imperial, and by the 1660s men and women from Ireland were to be found in the Spanish, French and Dutch Caribbean; the Portuguese and later Dutch Amazon; across New Spain; and in English settlements from Newfoundland to the Chesapeake in North America, to the Caribbean, India and the Mediterranean, at Tangier in North Africa.
Fourth, with this book I show how the Irish were subversives within empires. From the 1890s, from ideology to tactics, the Irish taught the Indians their ABC of freedom fighting, something that would be repeated across the colonial world. As one review of Making empire in The Irish Times of 11 November 2023 noted, ‘Ireland unmade empire just as it had helped make it, and just as it had itself been made by it’. Like it or not, empire and colonialism have profoundly impacted Ireland and the Irish, as in so many other places.
It is a timely moment to reflect on the legacies of empires. Events that occurred in early modern Ireland remain very much part of the DNA and are core to the identity of people living in Ireland today. Until recently few fully appreciated the significance of Ireland’s imperial past, but this is changing and there is a growing awareness of the importance of informed discussion and respectful debate. In the words of Christopher Kissane in his November 2023 Irish Times review of Making empire, this ‘is a complex history that we are still unravelling, and Ohlmeyer’s important work will, hopefully, force us to ask questions we have perhaps too long avoided. In an age of Brexit, decolonisation and renewed debates about Irish unity, such reflection is vital’.