Dr Patrick Houlihan

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Dr Patrick Houlihan
Research Fellow
Pembroke College
01865 (2)76444
patrick.houlihan@history.ox.ac.uk

I am a Research Fellow in Modern History at the University of Oxford, interested in the study of religion and violence.

My publications include a book entitled, Catholicism and the Great War: Religion and Everyday Life in Germany and Austria-Hungary, 1914-1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), which was awarded the Fraenkel Prize of the Wiener Library.

My research interests are classical and contemporary themes that put the global with the local, particularly regarding ideology and culture in war and peace. I am currently working on a book project that is a global history of the Catholic Church during the First World War.

Currently a Junior Research Fellow at Pembroke College, I obtained by PhD in History from the University of Chicago in 2011. My research has been sponsored in part by grants and fellowships from the Fulbright Program, the University of Chicago, and the American Philosophical Society.

Since 2016, I have been a member of Oxford's "Globalising and Localising the Great War" project and its research focus of "Global Religions," for which we have received major multi-year funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council of the United Kingdom (AHRC).

I am pleased to be contacted about my scholarly interests, both for academic and public purposes.

Research
  • Religion and Violence
  • Global History
  • Everyday Life, Emotions and the Senses

My first book, Catholicism and the Great War: Religion and Everyday Life in Germany and Austria-Hungary, 1914-1922, is a transnational, comparative study that challenges elite, state-centred instrumentalist readings of religion. Through extensive archival research in Central Europe, including the Vatican Archives, I portray an everyday history of Catholic believers beyond the pope, bishops, and clergy—thus, a family history that includes soldiers as well as women and children.  Challenging a religious history of “chosen people” nationalism dominated by Protestant Prussia, I argue that Catholics in the losing powers used their faith to cope with the war’s horrors much better than standard cultural narratives of secularization and literary modernism would have us believe.

My other publications include articles in the peer-reviewed digital encyclopaedia 1914-1918-Online http://www.1914-1918-online.net/index.html  as well as book chapters and articles in peer-reviewed journals such as Central European History and First World War Studies.

Since 2016, I am a member of the “Global Religions” section of Oxford’s “Globalising and Localising the Great War” project, funded by the AHRC. I am researching a book monograph that is a global history of the Catholic Church in the First World War. Putting the global with the local, this new book is a transnational study that challenges standard accounts dominated by elite actors, nation-state frameworks, and the chronology of 1914-1918.  I put European and US religious developments in dialogue with the Global South.

This project incorporates archival research across the globe, including the Archivio Segreto Vaticano. I am interested in representing beliefs of global religious communities beyond the standard depictions of the clerical hierarchy, though keeping the clergy’s agency firmly in mind. My work draws on theories from the history of everyday life as well as more recent developments in the history of emotions and the senses.

I have given invited talks including keynote lectures at various forums around the world including the Institute for Religion and Peace (Vienna), the National Endowment for the Humanities (Cincinnati, USA), the National World War I Museum (Kansas City, USA), and the Kandersteg Seminar of the Remarque Institute at NYU (Switzerland).

I am happy to be contacted about my scholarly interests, both for research collaborations as well as public media events that are of central importance during the centenary anniversary reflections on the First World War and its modern legacies.

Globalising and Localising the Great War, research cluster
http://greatwar.history.ox.ac.uk/?page_id=2244

Academia.edu account
https://oxford.academia.edu/PatrickHoulihan

Featured Publication

Catholicism and the Great War: Religion and Everyday Life in Germany and Austria-Hungary, 1914-1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015)

Catholicism and the Great War: Religion and Everyday Life in Germany and Austria-Hungary, 1914-1922

http://www.cambridge.org/bo/academic/subjects/history/military-history/catholicism-and-great-war-religion-and-everyday-life-germany-and-austria-hungary-19141922

http://www.wienerlibrary.co.uk/Fraenkel-Prize  

Publications

  • “Global Catholicism’s Crusade against Communism, 1917-1963,”

    2017
    |
    Chapter
    |
    Revolutions and Counter-Revolutions 1917 and its Aftermath from a Global Perspective
    A century later, this book discusses the transnational dimension of the numerous upheavals, rebellions, and violent reactions on a global level that began with 1917.
    History

  • Catholicism and the Great War

    2015
    |
    Book
    Annette Becker's pioneering book on Catholic France, War and Faith: The Religious Imagination in France, ... 8 Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1989), xiv– xvi.
    History

  • Imperial frameworks of religion: Catholic military chaplains of Germany and Austria-Hungary during the First World War

    2012
    |
    Journal article
    |
    First World War Studies

  • Local Catholicism as Transnational War Experience: Everyday Religious Practice in Occupied Northern France, 1914–1918

    2012
    |
    Journal article
    |
    Central European History
    <jats:p>The Great War is not a historical episode that easily lends itself to studying the subtleties of religious belief systems. Believers on opposite sides claimed that they were engaged in a just war of defense against aggression. They argued that God was on their side, and they prayed for victory of their nation—even if that meant the destruction of their fellow believers who were now considered the enemy. Despite Catholic claims to internationalism and universalism, the overwhelming majority of Catholic bishops and prominent clerics in the public sphere devoted themselves to national causes. Clerical nationalism seemed to overwhelm Christian fellowship, and the clerical nationalist paradigm often served as scholarly shorthand for the experience of religion during the war, especially for long-term studies of Christianity and war. The implacable hostility between French and German Catholic bishops became a convenient symbol of European national enmity in an age of total war.</jats:p>

  • Introduction: Re-thinking Decline and Fall: The Catholic Church in Habsburg Central Europe during the Great War

    Chapter
    |
    Religionen im Krieg 1914- 1918. Die Katholische Kirche in Österreich

  • Pope Benedict XV and the Forgotten Campaign to End World War I

    Internet publication
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  • Rimodellare i confini: l’Europa e le colonie nella Note di pace di Benedetto XV

    Chapter
    |
    Benedetto XV. Papa Giacomo Della Chiesa nel mondo dell'«inutile strage»
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