department of History
roinn na staire

Roisin Healy

Dr. Healy is a historian of modern Europe, with a particular focus on Germany and Poland. Having written one book on confessional relations in Germany, she is now working on projects that explore connections between Irish and Polish history.

 Contact Details

• E-mail: roisin.healynuigalway.ie
• Office: Room 415, History Department
• Extension: 2551
• Telephone: 353 91 492551

Teaching

Dr. Healy’s teaching interests span the breadth of modern German and European history from the French Revolution to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Teaching in Irish and English, she promotes literature and film as ways of accessing the past and maximises students’ opportunities for improving reading and writing skills. As well as teaching undergraduate courses, Dr. Healy contributes to the M.A. in History.

She teaches the following courses:

• HI112 War and Society in the Age of the French Revolution, 1789-1815
• HI292 Central Europe,1867-1918
• HI337 Nazi Germany
• HI350.II Church and State in Modern Europe  
• New Seminar: Coming to Terms with the Nazi Past
  

Research Interests

Dr. Healy’s first book, The Jesuit Specter in Imperial Germany, based on the doctoral dissertation she submitted to Georgetown University, was published by Brill (Humanities Press) in the series, Central European Histories, in 2003. An analysis of anti-Jesuitism, it examines debates about the law that banned Jesuits from the empire from 1872 to 1917 and the attitudes that sustained it. It is of interest to all scholars of modern Germany, particularly those specializing in religion, nationalism, liberalism, and political mobilization.

Learn more about The Jesuit Specter in Imperial Germany.

Dr. Healy is in the process of preparing two book manuscripts exploring links between Ireland and Poland.

  “Poland of the Sea”: Irish Views of Poland, 1698-2003

While there was little direct contact between the peoples of Ireland and Poland before the large-scale immigration facilitated by Poland’s accession to the EU in 2003, there were occasional waves of interest in Polish affairs among Irish observers. This book charts the changing image of Poland among the Irish over the course of three centuries. An Irishman, Bernard Connor, was the author of the first English-language account of Poland, A History of Poland, published in 1698. A scholarly study of his subject, the book contains an interesting irony for Irish readers. Connor, who served as physician to the Polish king, Jan Sobieski, is highly critical of the religious intolerance he found in Poland, but neglects to mention that, as a Catholic under British rule, he himself was obliged to seek an education on the continent. A century later, the United Irishmen looked to Poland, whose efforts at political reform were cut short by partition and eventual extinction in 1795, as a fellow-victim of the colonial ambitions of the great powers. The image of Ireland, as a western version of Poland, in one expression “Poland of the Sea”, dominated Irish nationalist discourse in the nineteenth century. Nationalists repeatedly pointed to Polish patriots as an inspiration and also highlighted British sympathies for Poland as incompatible with their suppression of Irish nationalist aspirations. The twentieth century saw continued solidarity with Poland, largely based on its Catholic identity, and great welcome for the first Polish pope, John Paul II. 

Intra-European Colonialism? Prussian Poland and Ireland, 1795-1918

The relationship between large European states and geographically adjacent territories that they have occupied and settled is notoriously difficult to characterize. Whether officially incorporated into the state or condemned to unequal political status, these territories are typically treated differently from the interior. As a challenge to nationalist claims of exceptionalism and homogenizing globalist perspectives, this project—a comparative analysis of the relationship between Prussia/Germany and its Polish provinces, on the one hand, and Britain and Ireland, on the other—rests on the premise that such territorial relationships within Europe constituted a distinct model of colonialism and seeks to define its essential elements. In line with growing scepticism towards national history, it embraces the concept of “entangled histories” to emphasize the interconnectedness of both German and Polish history and British and Irish history. In making the case for a European model of colonialism, it also challenges historical assumptions about deep-rooted differences between western and eastern European political traditions.

Although the similarities between Ireland and Poland have provoked frequent comment, this work breaks new ground in comparing these two countries with the requisite language skills in English, German, Irish and Polish. The fact that both sets of relationships operated on confessional and linguistic borders make them particularly compelling subjects for comparison and religion and language obvious starting points for the analysis. Protestantism played a constitutive role in British and German identity, while Catholicism, in both its institutional structures and symbolic vocabulary, provided a focus for resistance among the Irish and Poles. Both Britain and Germany attempted to suppress native languages and literatures, which then became rallying points for nationalist opposition.

Moreover, religion and language won new importance in the nineteenth century. The religious revival that followed the French Revolution and the opposition of the Catholic church in response to liberalism, socialism, and nationalism encouraged European Christians to identify strongly with their confessional group. The Protestant-Catholic conflict witnessed in Ireland was by no means anachronistic or unusual. At the same time, Herder’s emphasis on language as a marker of cultural distinctiveness encouraged nationalists throughout Europe to revive, purify, and standardize the languages deemed to hold their unique spirit. For Britons, Germans, Irish and especially Poles, the language they spoke became less an accident of birth or matter of convenience than a political statement. This study begins with the last partition of Poland in 1795, which established the area governed by Prussia for over a century, and ends in 1918, when Poland and Ireland were on the way to independent statehood after the transformations of World War One.

Publications

"Religion and Rebellion: The Catholic Church in Ireland and Poland in the Turbulent 1860s," in Polish-Irish Encounters, ed. Sabine Egger and John McDonagh, Peter Lang, forthcoming.

"Inventing Eastern Europe in Ireland, 1848-1918," T he Yearbook of the 'Gheorghe Sincai' Institute for Social Sciences and the Humanities of the Romanian Academy XII (2009), pp. 103-17.

“The View from the Margins: Ireland and Poland-Lithuania, 1698-1798,” in Britain and Poland-Lithuania: Contacts and Comparisons, ed., Richard Unger, Leiden: Brill, 2008, 355-74.

  “The German Empire and the Jesuits,” in Religious Refugees in Europe, Asia and North America (6 ^th-21 ^st Century), ed. Susanne Lachenicht, Münster: LIT Verlag, 2007, 133-47.

“Historiographical Review: Suicide in Early Modern and Modern Europe,” Historical Journal 49, no. 3, Sept. 2006: 903-19.

The Jesuit Specter in Imperial Germany, Central European Histories Series, Boston: Humanities Press (Brill), 2003. 

“Anti-Jesuitism in Imperial Germany: The Jesuit as Androgyne,” in Catholics, Protestants and Jews in Nineteenth-Century Germany, ed. Helmut Smith, Oxford: Berg, 2001, 153-81.

“Religion and Civil Society: Catholics, Jesuits, and Protestants in Imperial Germany,” in Frank Trentmann, ed., Paradoxes of Civil Society: New Perspectives on Modern German and British History (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2000), 244-62.

“Anti-Catholicism and Violence in Saxony and Ulster, 1886-1914,” Approaching a New Millennium: Lessons from the Past, Prospects for the Future, Proceedings of the 7th Conference of the International Society for the Study of the European Idea (Bergen: HIT Centre, 2000).

Reviews in Journal of Modern History, European History Quarterly, Francia, German Historical Institute Bulletin, Irish Studies Review, The Month, Borderlines, H-German, H-Nationalism.

Postgraduate Teaching

Dr. Healy is keen to supervise postgraduate students who wish to work on modern German and central European history, provided they possess the necessary language skills. She is currently supervising two doctoral students, Niall Williams, who is writing a study of the Volga German community, and Paul McNamara, who is exploring the Polonization of the northern Recovered Territories of Poland in the immediate post-WWII years. Paul already did a Masters thesis under Dr. Healy's supervision, which was subsequently published as Sean Lester, Poland and the Nazi Takeover of Danzig (2008). Damian Mac Con Uladh also wrote a Masters thesis on the National Democratic Party in the German Democratic Republic under her supervision.

Other

Róisín has been the recipient of awards from the IRCHSS, Fulbright Commission, DAAD, and Royal Irish Academy European Exchange Scheme, NUI, Galway Millennium Fund. She spent the academic year, 2001-2002 as a Visiting Scholar at the Center for European Studies, Harvard University.  

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