Dr Jack Hepworth

Working across modern Irish and British history, I research three cognate themes:

• Dealing with difficult pasts of conflict, trauma, or political defeat
• Contentious politics and memory in diaspora communities
• Complex intellectual and affective trajectories in social movements

Before taking up my current post in October 2021, I taught at the University of Central Lancashire and Newcastle University, and worked as a Research Assistant on four Impact Case Studies.

At the University of Central Lancashire, Newcastle University, and the University of Oxford, I have taught twenty modules and supervised thirty undergraduate and postgraduate dissertations, spanning public history, oral history, and historiographical theory, across modern Irish, British, and European history.

I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and a member of the British Association for Irish Studies, Oral History Society, and Society for the Study of Labour History.

Research

My two monographs examine strategic realignment, compromise, and contested memory in radical social movements – namely Irish republicanism and British leftism – since the global 1968. Both books analyse how political ideas and their contexts, from the local to the international, are commemorated and projected to wider publics for political purposes.

Combining archival research and innovative oral history methodologies, both books analyse how activists configure their networks, and how they retrospectively strive for ‘composure’ when forming life narratives, establishing commemorative practices, and dealing with difficult pasts.

Peer-reviewed articles have featured in Public History Review, Oral History, International Journal of the History of Sport, Irish Studies Review, Irish Political Studies, Contemporary British History, and Immigrants and Minorities. I have also written for, inter alia, History Today, the Times Literary Supplement, History & Policy, The Conversation, History Ireland, and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

Published with Liverpool University Press in 2021, my first monograph (‘The age-old struggle’: Irish republicanism from the Battle of the Bogside to the Belfast Agreement, 1969-1998) explores how Irish republicans positioned themselves in transnational cycles of protest. Drawing upon wide-ranging activist literature and twenty-five interviews with republican ex-combatants, ‘The age-old struggle’ examined the movement’s internal dynamics, especially assessing how republicans reworked generational motifs of Northern Ireland’s civil rights period for the peace process of the 1990s.

My second book (‘Preparing for power’: the Revolutionary Communist Party and its curious afterlives, 1976-2020: in press with Bloomsbury Academic for publication in 2023) analyses how a specific New Left milieu diagnosed a crisis of revolutionary politics from the late 1970s. Tracing the network’s subsequent evolution to Brexit and opposition to Covid-19 lockdowns, the book illuminates a wider constellation of post-1968 ideological and strategic controversies. Like my first book, ‘Preparing for power’ combines extensive documentary research and oral history analysis. Exploring how left political legacies have been continually contested in the media and the public sphere, the book situates contemporary debates surrounding anti-imperialism, democracy, and sovereignty.

My current project is Conflicted Identities: Irish Diaspora Activism and Memory. Conflicted Identities is a public history project examining collective memory of migration and minorities in the late twentieth century.

In partnership with Irish community centres in Liverpool, Leeds, and Newcastle, Conflicted Identities analyses how emigrant networks:

• Navigated the politics of the Northern Ireland conflict
• Interacted with the global Irish diaspora
• Forged solidarities and negotiated tensions with Britain’s other emigrant and ethnic-minority communities

Combining archival research, oral histories, and community engagement, Conflicted Identities examines how historical Irish diaspora activism has been contested, commemorated, and presented to wider publics. The project generates substantive outputs for a REF Impact Case Study, including community archives, curated exhibitions, witness seminars, and interactive digital resources. Conflicted Identities also forms the basis of a prospective monograph project.

I am currently preparing an article analysing public histories of the Good Friday Agreement’s twenty-fifth anniversary. Amid the current crises of Northern Ireland’s peace process, the article delineates how commemorative events and museum exhibitions – especially at Ulster Museum and the Imperial War Museums – have become increasingly critical of the Agreement’s limitations and legacies.

Across four Research Assistantships, I have led public history partnerships for REF Impact Case Studies, collaborating with community, diaspora, and heritage organisations. Project partnerships include:

• Foodbank Histories: A partnership with Newcastle West End Foodbank and Northern Cultural Projects CIC, Foodbank Histories produced an executive report for the Foodbank’s CEO and trustees. The report was cited by Philip Alston, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Poverty and Human Rights.
• Voices of ’68: I assisted Professor Chris Reynolds (Nottingham Trent University) gauging and recording Impact from his project, which resulted in a permanent exhibition at Ulster Museum.
• Windrush Lives in Lancashire: A community history partnership with Preston Black History Group and UCLan’s Institute for Black Atlantic Research. With Professor Alan Rice, I co-authored the project publication, which was highly commended by the Alan Ball Local History Awards and distributed to civic authorities and policymakers. Project outputs will also contribute to a forthcoming exhibition at The Dukes, Lancaster.

orcid.org/0000-0002-7756-8185