Thomas Bartlett - Biography#

Thomas Bartlett has held the Sixth Century Chairof Irish History at the University of Aberdeen since 2007, having been Professor of Modern Irish History at University College Dublin, 1995-2007. Bartlett was educated at Queen's University Belfast (B.A., 1970, Ph.D. 1976) and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor where he was awarded a full scholarship in History, 1970-71. He was then awarded a research scholarship at the Institute of Irish Studies, Queen's University Belfast, where he worked towards his Ph.D thesis on the Townshend viceroyalty (1767-1772), conferred in 1976. A schoolteacher in Belfast, 1974-78, he then taught at University College Galway, 1978 to 1995, and quickly rose to the rank of Associate Professor. In 1995, he was invited to take up the Chair of Modern Irish History at University College Dublin, and he taught and researched there until moving to take up his position at Aberdeen. Bartlett was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to attend the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (1982-3), and he has held visiting professorships at the University of Washington, Seattle (1997), and at the University of Notre Dame (1999). He was also Parnell Fellow in Irish Studies at Magdalene College, Cambridge (2001-2), Visiting Fellow there in 2004, and he was awarded a Government of Ireland Senior Research Fellowship for 2002-3. He has been a member of the Royal Irish Academy since 1995.

Bartlett spent his scholarly career investigating Irish history in several different contexts; Anglo-Irish contacts, continental links and Ireland’s position in the Atlantic world. He has studied Irish soldiers in Continental Europe, and in the service of the British Empire, and he has addressed the influence of changing military thinking on Irish warfare. His early work on George Lord Townshend examined him as a colonial administrator faced with problems similar to those confronting his counterparts in British North America. He next worked on Irish insurgency and published a much cited paper on that subject in Past and Present, and later still on espionage and intelligence gathering during the early modern period. More recently he was part of the research team also included members from Trinity College, Dublin, and the University of Cambridge that managed the digitization of the thousands of depositions held in the library of Trinity College, Dublin relating to the insurrection of 1641. More recently he was commissioned by Cambridge University Press to be General Editor of a four volume History of Ireland to be published on 2017.