department  of History
roinn na staire

Steven Ellis
head of school 

Professor Ellis read History at Manchester University before working at the Institute of Irish Studies, Queen's University, Belfast. He joined the History Department in Galway in 1976, was awarded a personal chair in 1991, and was appointed to the established chair of History in 2009. He became Head of History in 2004, and is presently Head of the School of Humanities.

Contact Details

• E-mail: steven.ellisnuigalway.ie
• Office: Room 406, History Department
• Extension: 2272
• Telephone: 353 91 492272

Teaching

Ellis has taught a wide range of history undergraduate courses, in English and in Irish, covering aspects of Ireland 1169-1689, Britain 1272-1707, and continental Europe 1450-1789.  He has also contributed courses to interdisciplinary taught Masters programmes in Culture & Colonialism and Irish Studies.  His courses on early modern British history were among the earliest to adopt the so-called New British perspective.  In 1999, he was Gastprofessor am Historischen Institut der Justus-Liebig-Universität, Gießen, Germany, on a scheme funded by the Deutsche Akademische Austauschdienst under the Hochschulsonderprogramm III to appoint foreign academics ’die als besonders qualifiziert für Lehraufgaben ausgewiesen sind’.  He was also visiting professor at the University of Potsdam, Germany in 2002.  In recent years, he has contributed sections on the English Pale in Ireland and the far north of England on team-taught modules for the MA in History, as well as the following undergraduate History modules:-

HI244 British History 1450-1603
HI267 Reformation Europe
HI429 Colloquium: the Mid-Tudor Crisis
HI358 Tudor Conquest of Ireland
HI436 Seminar:  the Reign of Henry VIII

Besides regularly serving as external examiner for PhD and Masters dissertations, and on Quality Reviews of History programmes, Ellis has also served at different times as external examiner for First-Cycle degree programmes in the Department of History, University of Ulster at Coleraine; the School of Divinity, History and Philosophy, University of Aberdeen; the Department of History, University of Malta; and the Department of History, University of Strathclyde.

Research and Writing

Ellis’s writings have been published in eight countries and in seven languages.  His early work focused on English society and institutions in Ireland.  His Master’s thesis, on the Kildare rebellion, 1534-35 (Manchester, 1974), underpinned many of his early publications on noble power and royal government.  His doctoral dissertation (Belfast, 1979) was inspired by Sir Geoffrey Elton’s work on Tudor government and later appeared as a monograph in the Royal Historical Society, Studies in History series.  Since the mid-1980s a prominent aspect of his research has been the development of perspectives on Irish history in a British context and on Ireland as one of the Tudor borderlands.  These perspectives were first explored in his Tudor Ireland, long the standard survey of the subject (extensively revised and extended for a new edition in 1998), and were recognised by the National University of Ireland with the award of a second doctorate (D.Litt., 1988).  More recently, he has also worked on his native north of England and on British state formation more generally.  This work produced a pioneering analysis of marcher lordship and frontier society in the form of a monograph comparing Tudor Ireland and the English far north, and a comparative survey of early modern Britain and Ireland written from a ’New British’ perspective.  In recent years, he has been working on frontiers and regions in a European context:  his latest research has appeared in several edited volumes, particularly collections of essays associated with CLIOHRES, a Network of Excellence supported by the European Commission’s 6^th Framework programme.  At present, he is completing a comparative study of Meath and Northumberland as frontier societies in the early Tudor state.

Major Publications

(ed. with Iakovos Michailidis) Regional and Transnational History in Europe (Edizioni Plus – Pisa University Press, 2011).

(ed. with François Berdah, Raingard Eßer and Miloš Řezník), Frontiers, Regions and Identities in Europe (Edizioni Plus – Pisa University Press, 2009)

The making of the British Isles, the state of Britain and Ireland,1450-1660 (Pearson Longman, 2007)

(ed. with Lud’a Klusáková), Imagining frontiers, contesting identities (Edizioni Plus – Pisa University Press, 2007)

(ed. with Guðmundur Hálfdanarson and Ann Katherine Isaacs), Citizenship in Historical Perspective (Edizioni Plus – Pisa University Press, 2006)

(ed. with Raingard Eßer), Frontiers and the Writing of History, 1500-1850 (Wehrhahn Verlag, 2006)

(ed. with Lud’a Klusáková), Frontiers and identities:  exploring the research area (Edizioni Plus – Pisa University Press, 2006)

(ed.), Empires and states in European perspective (Edizioni Plus, 2002)

Ireland in the age of the Tudors:  English expansion and the end of Gaelic rule, 1447-1603 (Addison Wesley Longman, 1998)

(ed. with Sarah Barber, Conquest and Union:  fashioning a British state 1485-1725 (Longman Group Limited, 1995)

Tudor frontiers and noble power:  the making of the British state (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1995)

Reform and Revival:  English Government in Ireland, 1470-1534 (Royal Historical Society, 1986)

Tudor Ireland:  Crown, Community and the Conflict of Cultures 1470-1603 (Longman Group Limited, 1985)

EDITORIAL ACTIVITIES

Member of the Editorial Board for The Formation of Europe/Historische Formationen Europas series on European history, 2005-

General Editor, The Longman History of Ireland, 1986-98.  General Editor, The British Isles, a History of Four Nations, 1988-2007.  Two series published by Pearson Education Ltd.

Associate Editor, Tudor section (Ireland), Oxford  Dictionary of National Biography, 1998-2004.

Section Editor for Ireland, Royal Historical Society British Bibliographies: 1500-1700, 1991-7

Member of ENGLOBE, Enlightenment and Global History, a Marie Curie Initial Training Network of the European Commission’s Seventh Framework programme, 2009-

Member of the Coordinating Committee and Editorial Board of CLIOH WORLD, Erasmus Academic Network supported by the European Commission’s Directorate General for Education and Culture, 2009-11

Member of the Management Committee and Editorial Board of CLIOHRES, Network of Excellence of the European Commission's Sixth Framework programme, 2005-10

Member and Task Force leader on Racial Discrimination and Ethnicity of CLIOHnet, the European History Network, supported through the Socrates-Erasmus programme of the European Commission’s Directorate General for Education and Culture, 2002-05

Member of the ’external expert panel’ for History, and Co-Chair, of TEEP (Transnational European Evaluation Project), 2002.

Participant in the European Science Foundation’s project on ’The Origins of the Modern State in Europe (13th-18th century)’, 1989-93; member of Working Group E:  Representation, Resistance, and Sense of Community.  

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