Professor Senia Paseta

Professor of Modern History, co-Director of Women in the Humanities

St Hugh's College

01865 (2)74900

senia.paseta@history.ox.ac.uk

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.

See page on St Hugh's College website

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.

Women in the Humanities: http://www.torch.ox.ac.uk/womenandhumanities

I am a co-director of the Women in Humanities programme in the Oxford Centre for Research in the Humanities (TORCH). I am also involved in a number of public history initiatives to mark the centenary of Ireland's revolutionary decade (see links below for examples):

Feminist Political Thought and Activism in Revolutionary Ireland, c. 1880–1918

Journal article
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Transactions of the Royal Historical Society
New Issues and Old: women and politics in Ireland, 1914–1918

2018
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Journal article
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Women's History Review
Uncertain Futures Essays about the Irish Past for Roy Foster

2016
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Book

Essays about the Irish Past for Roy Foster Senia Paseta. OXFORD UN C E RTAIN FUTURES ESSAYS ABOUT THE IRISH PAST for Roy Foster Edited by Senia Paseta Uncertain FUtUres Uncertain Futures Essays about the Irish Past for.
'Constance Markievicz'

2015
|
Chapter
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1916 Portraits and Lives

This book is a selection of 40 articles from the Royal Irish Academy's Dictionary of Irish Biography, dealing with 42 people whose careers, in one way or another, were deeply involved with the Easter rising of 1916.The biographies include ...

Biography & Autobiography
Catholics of Consequence: Transnational Education, Social Mobility, and the Irish Catholic Elite, 1850-1900

2015
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Other
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SOCIAL HISTORY
Poverty and the Poor Law in Ireland, 1850-1914

2015
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Other
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ENGLISH HISTORICAL REVIEW
'She Said She Was in the Family Way': Pregnancy and Infancy in Modern Ireland

2015
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Other
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ENGLISH HISTORICAL REVIEW
'Waging War on the Streets': the Irish Women Patrol, 1914-22

2014
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Journal article
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Irish Historical Studies

Female activists across the United Kingdom had insisted from the late nineteenth century that the employment of women police who would deal with problems specific to women and children could help to address pressing social questions, or at least to offer women some protection within the entirely male criminal justice system. Their campaign for women police was connected to similar demands for the employment of female prison visitors and inspectors and, later, jurors and lawyers, and it was predicated on the idea that neither prisons nor courts afforded women fair and equal treatment under the law. Early victories included the appointment of police matrons and searchers, but the resistance of police authorities and most other civil servants to female officers remained solid into the early twentieth century, feminist campaigning notwithstanding. The outbreak of the First World War, however, provided an ideal context for renewed activism on the issue, not least because commentators across the British Isles predicted that the apparent inability of girls and young women to resist the lure of uniformed men would lead to outbreaks of war-induced sexual promiscuity and a decline in standards of public behaviour.
Women and War in Ireland, 1914-18

2014
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Journal article
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History Ireland
Irish Nationalist Women, 1900-1918

2013
|
Book

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.

History

Robin Adams
Charlotte Bennett
Lyndsey Jenkins

I would be willing to hear from potential DPhil or any potential Masters students looking at Comparative British and Irish History or Modern Irish political and Social History.

I currently teach:

Prelims	FHS	Masters
British History VI: 1815-1924	British History VI: 1815-1924	Crisis of the Union, 1750-1998
British History VII: Since 1900	British History VII: Since 1900	Women's Life Writing and Historical Change in Britain and Ireland since 1780
General History IV: Society, Nation and Empire, 1815-1914	General History XIV: 1941-73
Approaches to History	Further Subject: Nationalism, Politics and Culture in Ireland, 1870-1921
Optional Subject: The New Women in Britain and Ireland, 1880-1920	Special Subject: The Northern Ireland Troublers, 1965-85
	Disciplines of History