Alan O'Day

Alan O'Day was a historian ath the University of North London prior to it merging to form London Metroplitan University.

He is a long time collaborator of Yonah Alexander and has written extensively on Ireland.

Alan O'Day was a Senior Fellow, RAI for 2002-3 and is now a Senior Associate along with being Fellow in Modern History, Greyfriars in the University of Oxford. He formerly held a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship, and obtained a B.A. (Michigan), M.A. (Roosevelt, Northwestern), Ph.D. (London) and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Previously he has been a Visiting Fellow at St John’s, Wolfson, St Antony’s and Mansfield Colleges, University of Oxford; University of Durham; Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh; School of Advanced Study, University of London; The Catholic University of America and Senior Visiting Fellow, Institute of Irish Studies, Queen’s University Belfast. He was a Visiting Professor at Trinity College, Dublin. Previous awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Nuffield Foundation and numerous grants from the British Academy and other foundations.

...My work is not exclusively American but encompasses social, political and economic themes of historical and contemporary aspects of nationalism, ethnic conflict and the position of minorities. It focuses on Irish nationalism, Irish ethnic communities in Britain and America and contemporary violence in Northern Ireland and uses both empirical and theoretical approaches. I have made a contribution to bibliographical and historiographic studies as well. My investigations of the Irish in Britain and America explores the themes of identity, integration and incorporation of an ethnic/religious minority. This also illuminates the options available to a group lacking a national or separatist claim to the territory it inhabits.

I am working on the interaction between Irish politics and Irish-Americans, on the formation and activities of Irish-American organisations and on political terrorism.

Affiliations

• 2003, a visiting fellow at Oxford University's Rothermere American Institute.

Publications

He has authored and edited more than 50 books and articles, including

• Irish Home Rule (1998),
• co-edited with D. George Boyce, Defenders of the Union (2001).
• ‘The Irish Diaspora’ in D. George Boyce and Alan O’Day (eds.) The Making of Modern Irish History,
• ‘Irish Diaspora Politics in Perspective: The United Irish Leagues of America and Great Britain, 1900–14’, Immigrations & Minorities (1999),
• ‘Irish Nationalism and Anglo-American Relations in the Later Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century’ was published in Fred M. Leventhal and Roland Quinault (eds.), Anglo-American Attitudes (2000) a volume resulting from a joint Royal Historical Society/North American Conference on British Studies meeting held at Harvard University,
• ‘Information, Media and Power: Charles Stewart Parnell’s Mission To North America, 1880’, in Hiram Morgan (ed.), Information, Media and Power Through the Ages: Historical Studies 24 (2001)
• ‘John Boyle O’Reilly’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (forthcoming)’.
• Additionally, he has contributed more than twenty biographies to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and to the Irish National Biography, both forthcoming.