department of History
roinn na staire

niall o ciosain

Niall holds a BA from Trinity College Dublin and a PhD from the European University Institute, Florence.

Contact Details

• E-mail: niall.ociosainnuigalway.ie
• Office: Room 410, History Department
• Extension: 3019
• Telephone: 353 91 493019

Undergraduate Teaching

• HI112 First Year History: Ireland in the 1790s
• HI230 Social History of Europe 1650-1750
• HI249 Economy & Society in Ireland 1700-1850
• HI376 Popular Culture in pre-Industrial Europe
• HI443 State and People in Ireland 1820-1845 (Final Year Seminar Module)

Research Interests

The social and cultural history of Ireland and Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with an emphasis on literacy and education, the history of the book in Ireland, popular printing and reading, language shift and language change. I am currently pursuing two specific strands of research. The first focuses on the state as ethnographer and publisher in nineteenth-century Ireland, the second on the comparative print history of the four Celtic languages, 1700-1900.

RECENT PUBLICATIONS

’Pious Miscellanies and Spiritual Songs: devotional publishing and reading in Irish and Scottish Gaelic, 1760-1900’ in James Kelly and Ciarán MacMurchaidh (eds.), Linguistic and Cultural Frontiers: English and Irish, 1650-1850, (Four Courts Press, 2012), 267-282 

’Bacaigh agus Boccoughs. Fianaise ar chultúr na Gaeilge sa naoú céad déag’ in Diarmuid Ó Giolláin (ed.) Féilscríbhinn Ghearóid Uí Chrualaoich (Cork University Press 2012), 116-128 

’Old languages in a new country: publishing and reading in the Celtic languages in nineteenth-century Australia’, Australasian Journal of Irish Studies 11 (2011), 58-72

’Oral culture, literacy and the growth of a popular readership, 1800-1850’, ’Pedlars and book distribution’, ’Almanacs in the nineteenth century’ all in James H. Murphy (ed.), The Oxford History of the Irish Book Vol. 4 (Oxford University Press 2011), 173-91, 192-7, 198-200

Print and Popular Culture in Ireland 1750-1850 (illustrated paperback edition, Lilliput 2010)

'The Poor Inquiry and Irish Society - a consensus theory of truth', Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 20 (2010), 127-139

'Ireland' (with Clare Hutton), 'An Gúm, Sáirséal agus Dill' in Michael Suarez and H. R. Woudhuysen (eds.), The Oxford Companion to the Book (Oxford University Press, 2009)

’Irish Famine’ in David Forsythe (ed.), Encyclopaedia of Human Rights (Oxford University Press, 2009), Vol.3, 225-34

'"114 commissions and 60 committees": phantom figures from a surveillance state', Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy Section C Vol. 109 (2009), 367-385

'Missing Pieces', review of Michael Murphy & Jan Smaczny (eds), Music in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, in The Journal of Music in Ireland 8 (2008), 30-4

’Language, print and the Catholic church in Ireland, 1700-1900’ in Donald McNamara (ed.), Which Direction Ireland? (Cambridge Scholars Press 2007), 125-38

'Print and Irish, 1570-1900: An exception among the Celtic languages?' Radharc: A journal of Irish and Irish-American Studies 5-7 (2004-6), 73-106

 ’Gaelic culture and language shift’ in Laurence Geary and Margaret Kelleher (eds.), Nineteenth-century Ireland. A guide to recent research (UCD Press 2005), p.136-152.

’Bibliotheque Bleue, Verte Erin: some aspects of popular printed literature in France and Ireland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’ LISA (e-journal, Université de Caen), Vol.III, no.1 (2005), accessible at http://www.unicaen.fr/mrsh/anglais/lisa/publications/008/v3_2005-1_055ciosain.pdf

(ed.), Explaining Change in Cultural History: Historical Studies XXIII (Dublin: UCD Press 2005)

Print and Popular Culture in Ireland 1750-1850 (London: Macmillan Press, 1997)

FORTHCOMING PUBLICATIONS

’Popular Song, Readers and Language: printed anthologies of songs in Irish and Scottish Gaelic, 1780-1820’ in Michael Brown, Catriona Kennedy, John Kirk, and Andrew Noble (eds.), United Islands? Multi-Lingual Radical Poetry and Song in Britain and Ireland, 1770–1820 (Pickering and Chatto 2013)

Beggars and Blue Books: the state as ethnographer and publisher in nineteenth-century Ireland (Oxford University Press) 

Publishing and reading in the Celtic languages 1700-1900: an overview' in Cultural and Social History

’Print literacy in Irish in the nineteenth century’ in The Oxford History of the Irish Book Vol. 2 (Oxford : Oxford University Press)

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