The Academy in a decade of revolution

Professor Mary Daly will give the fifth lecture in our series of Lunchtime Lectures on ‘Intellectual life in Ireland 1910-1920’. This series accompanies a library exhibition on the same theme.

Professor Daly’s lecture will look at the membership of the Academy c.1910, its current research projects and intellectual interests and how this evolved over the decade. She will also discuss the decision to expel Eoin MacNeill from the Academy and his reinstatement.

Speaker: Professor Daly is one of Ireland’s most prominent senior historians and is a member of the government’s Expert Advisory Group on Commemorations. She is emeritus professor of history at UCD and served for seven years as Principal of UCD College of Arts and Celtic Studies; she has also held visiting positions at Harvard and Boston College. She is the first female President of the Royal Irish Academy in its 229-year history and was elected in March 2014. From 2000 to 2004 she was Secretary of the Royal Irish Academy and vice-chair of the Academy’s Working Group on Higher Education. She has served on the National Archives Advisory Council and the Irish Manuscripts Commission. Professor Daly was involved in the commemoration of the sesquicentenary of the great famine 1995-97, and with Dr Margaret O’Callaghan she directed a research project on the Golden Jubilee of the 1916 Rising, resulting in the publication of a major edited work: 1916 in 1966: commemorating the Easter Rising (2007). Over the course of her distinguished career, Professor Daly has researched widely and published prolifically, notably: Dublin, the Deposed Capital: A Social and Economic History, 1860-1914 (1984); Women and Work in Ireland (1997); The Slow Failure: Population Decline and Independent Ireland, 1920-1973 (2006); and, with Theo Hoppen, Gladstone: Ireland and Beyond (2011).

Listen to Professor Daly's lecture here