Richard English MRIA
Image caption: Richard English MRIA, 2019 RIA Gold Medallist in the Social Sciences.
Citation on the awarding of the 2019 RIA Gold Medal in the Social Sciences to Richard English MRIA
Written on 14 September 2020
Richard English is a world-leading scholar of modern Ireland and of the associated international politics and histories of terrorism and nationalism.
He is the author of eight books, the editor/co-editor of a further seven, and his books have won numerous prestigious awards. His research has attracted global attention for its originality and intellectual significance in shaping scholarly debates. Through his research, writing, teaching, supervision, and public contributions and commitment to public debate, Professor English’s work has established him as a leading scholarly authority on modern Irish history and politics, and on the interrelated histories and politics of terrorism and nationalism as major global phenomena. He has situated Irish political history in debates in such a way as to attract widespread global attention to Irish experience; through his own scholarship, and through his role in sustaining major debates in Belfast on Irish and international affairs, he has sought to bring international networks and frameworks to Irish intellectual, university, and public life.
Professor English has engaged extensively in public commentary and debate (frequently writing for newspapers and appearing on national/ international television/radio in relation to his research) and he has given invited Lectures on his research in more than twenty countries.
He has been elected to the Royal Irish Academy, a Fellowship of the British Academy, the Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and the Fellowship of the Royal Historical Society. He has been a Visiting Fellow at Stanford University, is an Honorary Fellow of Keble College Oxford, an Honorary Professor at the University of St Andrews, and a Faculty Affiliate at the University of Chicago. In 2018 he was awarded a CBE for “services to the understanding of modern-day terrorism and political history.”
Professor English was appointed Professor of Politics at Queen’s University Belfast in 1999 and in 2011 he was appointed Wardlaw Professor of Politics at the University of St Andrews, where he was also Director of the Handa Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence . In 2016 he returned to Queen’s University Belfast, where he is Professor of Politics, Distinguished Professorial Fellow in the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security, and Justice, and the University’s Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Internationalization and Engagement.
Richard English’s academic work has consistently met the most rigorous standards of objective scholarship, enjoys a very high prestige in his field, and in addition has delivered an urgently topical social outreach in that it has manifestly contributed to a better understanding of the fraught long- and short-term dynamics of political violence in Northern Ireland. For anyone worldwide to deal with British and Irish political history and conflict studies, Professor English is a beacon scholar.