Professor Senia Paseta
Professor of Modern History, co-Director of Women in the Humanities
St Hugh's College
01865 (2)74900
I am a historian of modern Ireland with a particular interest in the history of education, religious identity formation and political movements and ideas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I have published on the development of a Catholic university elite in pre-independence Ireland and I have also worked on a number of aspects of women's history, including the history of feminism and women's education in Ireland. My current research is in the history of women and political activism in Britain and Ireland. My most recent book, Irish Nationalist Women, 1900-1918 (Cambridge, 2013), examines how politically active women worked within broader nationalist and feminist contexts during a volatile period of Irish history. I am now working on a book which considers further forms of women's political activism including Irish unionism, socialism, education and social reform. I am also interested in connections between Irish and British radical politics and am currently writing on the centrality of the Irish Question to the women's suffrage movement across the United Kingdom.
Irish Nationalist Women, 1900-1918, Cambridge University Press, 2013
This is a major new history of the experiences and activities of Irish nationalist women in the early twentieth century, from learning and buying Irish to participating in armed revolt. Using memoirs, reminiscences, letters and diaries, Senia Pašeta explores the question of what it meant to be a female nationalist in this volatile period, revealing how Irish women formed nationalist, cultural and feminist groups of their own as well as how they influenced broader political developments. She shows that women's involvement with Irish nationalism was intimately bound up with the suffrage movement as feminism offered an important framework for women's political activity. She covers the full range of women's nationalist activism from constitutional nationalism to republicanism, beginning in 1900 with the foundation of Inghinidhe na hÉireann (Daughters of Ireland) and ending in 1918 with the enfranchisement of women, the collapse of the Irish Party and the ascendancy of Sinn Fein.
