We are starting our autumn series of meetings earlier this year. Our September meeting will take place on Wednesday, 4th September at 7:00 pm in the Observatory Library.

Our speaker this month is Dr Edward Burke, who will discuss:

Ulster’s Lost Counties – loyalism after partition in 1920 in Cavan, Donegal and Monaghan and its effect on Northern Ireland

A graduate of Trinity College Dublin (TCD) and the University of St Andrews, Edward Burke is an Assistant Professor in the History of War since 1945 at University College Dublin (UCD). He is currently the Director of the International War Studies MA programme and Director of Graduate Teaching at the School of History. Prior to joining UCD, he was an Assistant/Associate Professor in International Relations at the University of Nottingham (2017-2022). His research interests are principally in military cohesion, paramilitarism and political violence. In 2020 he was awarded a two-year UK Arts and Humanities Research Council Early Career Leadership Fellowship on paramilitary violence in rural Ulster since 1920. He is the author of An Army of Tribes: British Army Cohesion, Deviancy and Murder in Northern Ireland, 1971-1972 (Liverpool University Press, 2018) and Ulster’s Lost Counties: Loyalism and Paramilitarism since 1920 (Cambridge university Press, 2024) and the forthcoming Ghosts of a Family : Ireland’s Most Infamous Unsolved Murder, the Outbreak of the Civil War and the Origins of the Modern Troubles (Merrion Press, September 2024)