History Department Faculty
Guy Beiner
Professor, Sullivan Chair in Irish Studies
Guy Beiner
Ph.D.
Contact
Connolly House 211
Telephone: 617-552-3793
Email: guy.beiner@bc.edu
Education
- Ph.D., University College Dublin
Research Interests
Modern Europe; cultural and social history; the long nineteenth century; Irish studies; memory studies; oral history and folk traditions; pandemics
Department
Biography
Guy Beiner is the Sullivan Chair in Irish Studies. He teaches courses on eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth century Irish history as well as more general topics in late-modern history. He specializes in the historical study of remembering and forgetting. Other interests include oral history, folklore, public history and heritage, historiography, terrorism, the fin de siècle, and the ‘Spanish’ Influenza pandemic. His books on history, memory and forgetting in Ireland have won multiple international awards.
He was a professor of modern history at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel and has held research fellowships at Trinity College Dublin, University of Notre Dame, Central European University, University of Oxford, as well being a former Burns Scholar at Boston College. He is co-editor, with Oona Frawley and Ray Cashman, of the Indiana University Press series Irish Culture, Memory, Place.
REPRESENTATIVE PUBLICATIONS
Books
Pandemic Re-Awakenings: The Forgotten and Unforgotten ‘Spanish’ Flu of 1918-1919 (Oxford University Press, 2022)
Forgetful Remembrance: Social Forgetting and Vernacular Historiography of a Rebellion in Ulster (Oxford University Press, 2018)
Awarded Irish Historical Research Prize (National University of Ireland); Katherine Briggs Folklore Award (Folklore Society, UK); George L. Mosse Prize in the intellectual and cultural history of Europe since 1500 (American Historical Association); Wayland D. Hand Prize for history and folklore (American Folklore Society). Shortlisted for the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Literary Prize; Honorable Mention for the James S. Donnelly, Sr.; selected as a Times Literary Supplement book of the year.
Remembering the Year of the French: Irish Folk History and Social Memory (University of Wisconsin Press, 2007)
Awarded Ratcliff Prize (Michaelis-Jena Ratcliff Prize Trust) for an important contribution to the study of folklore and folk life in Great Britain and Ireland”; Wayland D. Hand Prize for history and folklore (American Folklore Society). Listed for the Cundill History Prize; finalist for the National Council of Public History Book Award.
Select Chapter/Articles
“Religion and Memory in Modern Ireland” in Gladys Ganiel and Andrew R. Holmes (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Religion in Modern Ireland (Oxford University Press, 2024), 542-60.
“Racializing Irish Historical Consciousness” in Malcolm Sen and Julie McCormick Weng (eds.), Race in Irish Literature and Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2024), 42-58 (with Oded Y. Steinberg).
“Remembering to Forget: Heaney and 1798 Revisited”, Éire-Ireland, 58:1-2 (2023), 51-76.
“Irish Historical Studies Avant La Lettre: The Antiquarian Genealogy of Interdisciplinary Scholarship” in Renée Allyson Fox, Mike Cronin and Brian Ó Conchubhair (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Irish Studies (Routledge, 2021), 47-58.
“When Monuments Fall: The Significance of Decommemorating”, Éire-Ireland, 56:1 (2021), 33-61.
“A Short History of Irish Memory in the Long Twentieth Century” in Thomas Bartlett (ed.), The Cambridge History of Ireland, vol. 4 (Cambridge University Press, 2018), 693-710.
“Irish Studies and the Dynamics of Disremembering” in Marguérite Corporaal, Christopher Cusack and Ruud van den Beuken (eds.), Irish Studies and the Dynamics of Memory: Transitions and Transformation (Peter Lang, 2017), 297-321.
“The Formation of Modern Irish Memory, c.1740–1914” in Eugenio F. Biagini and Mary E. Daly (eds.), The Cambridge Social History of Modern Ireland (Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 586-93.
“Probing the Boundaries of Irish Memory: From Postmemory to Prememory and Back”, Irish Historical Studies, 39:154 (2014), 296-307.
“Fenianism and the Martyrdom-Terrorism Nexus in Ireland before Independence” in D. Janes and A. Houen (eds.), Martyrdom and Terrorism: Pre-Modern to Contemporary Perspectives (Oxford University Press, 2014), 199-220.
“Recycling Irish Popular Culture” in Méabh Ní Fhuartháin and David M. Doyle (eds.), Ordinary Irish Life: Music, Sport and Culture (Irish Academic Press, 2013), 5-20.
“The Mystery of the Cannon Chains: Remembrance in the Irish Countryside”, History Workshop Journal, 66 (2008), 81-106.
“Between Trauma and Triumphalism: The Easter Rising, the Somme, and the Crux of Deep Memory in Modern Ireland”, Journal of British Studies, 46: 2 (2007), 366-389.