New 3-year British Academy Postdoctoral Researcher

28 August 2026

Dr Robert O’Sullivan will be joining the Faculty of History as a British Academy Postdoctoral Researcher for three years from October. Dr. O’Sullivan is a political and social historian of nineteenth-century American and Irish history. Dr O’Sullivan will be a JRF at Jesus College, and a fellow of the Rothermere American Institute. At Oxford, he will be mentored by Professor Ian McBride.

During his Postdoctoral Fellowship, Dr O’Sullivan will work on his second monograph, ‘Empire, Citizenship and Race: Mathew Carey and the Making of Irish America’, a major reconsideration of the emergence and consolidation of Irish America before the mass-immigration of the Famine generation, through a study of the career and legacy of Mathew Carey (1760-1838), the Catholic Irish-born publisher, philanthropist and humanitarian. The project uses Carey as a vantage point for exploring the Irish immigrant experience of the early-national and Jacksonian United States and his legacy and influence on subsequent generations of Irish immigrants to the United States.