Senia Paseta is working on two main research projects. The first is a history of Irish women in the twentieth century, with particular emphasis on women’s experiences within the family, education, work, religion, politics and the law. Her research so far has focused on the Irish constitution of 1937, women’s education and women’s work. The second is a more specialised study of women and politics in early twentieth-century Ireland.

Irish women’s history is a lively field, but particular kinds of political activity have received the lion’s share of scholarly attention, especially in the turbulent late nineteenth and early twentieth century period. Irish women were prominent in nationalist and unionist politics of the constitutional and militant varieties, but research into their involvement in these movements has tended to obscure analysis of other types of political activity. Dr Paseta’s initial research suggests strongly that Irish women were involved in a great variety of political movements, and that many of them were largely - and sometimes even wholly - unconnected to the national question. The way that women in fact overcame the unquestionable divisions created by political and confessional affiliations is one of the key issues which has arisen from initial research. By moving attention away from the constitutional question, Dr Paseta will highlight the way that politically-active Irish women worked in both a United Kingdom and an international context.

Most of the relevant archival material is held in Ireland, though extensive use has also been made of the British and the Bodleian libraries. With the assistance of a Philip Leverhulme Prize, Dr Paseta spent part of the 2007-08 academic year working in a number of Irish archives, before returning to Oxford to write.