Dr Jack Hepworth

I work primarily in modern Irish and British history, with particular research interests in several cognate themes: radicalism and compromise in social movements and the life-course; oral history and contested memory; and political subjectivities in relation to migration and diaspora.

In addition to working as a research assistant on four projects, I taught at the University of Central Lancashire and Newcastle University before taking up my current post in October 2021. I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Research Interests

Published by Liverpool University Press in October 2021, my first monograph, ('The age-old struggle': Irish republicanism from the Battle of the Bogside to the Belfast Agreement, 1969-1998) explored the internal dynamics of Irish republicanism since 1968. Based on wide-ranging primary evidence and 25 interviews with republican ex-combatants, ‘The age-old struggle’ examines Irish republicanism’s temporal-spatial complexity, the heterogeneity of its intellectual influences, and the movement’s internal dynamics amid tactical and strategic reorientation.

I am currently preparing my second book, which develops my research on the British left and the Northern Ireland conflict. Like 'The age-old struggle', this book project ('Preparing for power': the Revolutionary Communist Party and its curious afterlives, 1976-2021) scrutinises how radical activists reassessed their politics as they navigated profound political transformation through the late twentieth century. Under contract with Bloomsbury Academic, 'Preparing for power' combines extensive documentary research and oral history testimony to explicate transformations in social movements and contested conceptions of anti-imperialism, democracy, independence, and sovereignty.

In addition to this book project, I am preparing two articles:

• A study of how Irish republican prisoners interacted with the Provisional movement's tactic experimentation and strategic reorientation between the hunger strikes of 1981 and the Provisional IRA ceasefire of 1994
• An analysis of how the Revolutionary Communist Party and its front group, the Irish Freedom Movement, engaged with the conflict in Northern Ireland between the RCP's inception in 1981 and the Good Friday Agreement of 1998

Finally, collaborating with Irish diaspora groups in England, I am currently in the early stages of designing a research project to analyse historically identity formation, ageing, and intergenerational memory in the second-generation Irish diaspora since 1969. Advocating dialogue between oral historians, scholars of memory and composure, social gerontologists, and the intergenerational strand of social movement studies, this project will elucidate contested diasporic identities and political and cultural activism.