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Dr Olwen Purdue

BA, MA, PhD (QUB)

Lecturer in Irish Social and Economic History

Tel: +44 (0)28 9097 3985

E-mail:  o.purdue@qub.ac.uk

Office: 16UQ G.04

Olwen Purdue completed her undergraduate degree in English at Queen’s University Belfast.  After working for several years as a teacher, she obtained her MA in Irish Studies and PhD in History, also at Queen’s.  She spent two years as a Research Assistant on the ESRC-funded project, ‘Welfare Regimes under the Irish Poor Law’, after which she was  appointed as a Research Fellow at the Institute of Irish Studies.

Olwen is a committee-member of the Society for the Study of Nineteenth Century Ireland and the Economic and Social History Society of Ireland. She is currently engaged as a consultant on the historical and interpretive aspects of Belfast’s new Titanic Signature Project and other projects with Belfast City Council.

Research Interests

Her research interests cover a range of issues relating to the social and economic history of nineteenth and early twentieth–century Ireland, in particular land and power, poverty and welfare, and urban change. Her doctoral research, which examined the economic and political pressures on landed society in late C19-early C20 Ulster, was recently published by UCD Press as The Big House in the north of Ireland: land, power and social elites 1870-c.1960.  Olwen’s recent research has focussed on questions of poverty and empowerment: in the ways in which the poor increasingly utilised the welfare system as part of their ‘economy of makeshifts’; in the ways in which the administration of the poor law became increasingly contested by social and economic elites and political movements; and in the experience and relief of poverty in the contested political space of C19 Belfast.  She is currently working on an edited volume on the emergence of Belfast as a dynamic city at the end of the nineteenth century.

Publications

Books:

The Big House in the North of Ireland: Land, Power and Elites 1878-1960 (Dublin: UCD Press, 2009).

The MacGeough Bonds of The Argory: an Ulster Gentry Family 1880-1950 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005).

Articles and chapters:

‘Poverty and power: the workhouse in a north Antrim town 1861-1921’, Irish Historical Studies 148, (November, 2011).

‘Regional dimensions of the Irish Poor Law: the north of Ireland 1851-1921’, in Virginia Crossman and Peter Gray (eds.) Poverty and Welfare in Ireland 1838-1948 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2011)

'Challenge and change: the country house in Northern Ireland 1921-2001’, in Terence Dooley (ed), The Irish Country House: Its Past, Present and Future (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2011)

‘Sources for the history of the Irish Poor Law in the post-Famine period’ with Virginia Crossman, Georgina Laragy and Séan Lucey, in Ciara Breathnach and Catherine Lawless (eds), Visual, Material and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2010).

‘ “Attacked from without and diseased from within”? Northern Ireland's landed class 1921-60’ in Eadaoin Agnew, Eamonn Hughes, Caroline Magennis and Christina Morin (eds), A Further Shore: Essays in Irish and Scottish Studies (Aberdeen UP, 2007).

Forthcoming:

The Irish Lord Lieutenancy 1541-1922 ed. with Peter Gray (Dublin: UCD Press, 2012),

Belfast, The Emerging City 1870-1914, ed. (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2013)

Teaching

Undergraduate:

HIS2011: Politics and society in nineteenth-century Ireland

HIS2012: Politics and society in twentieth-century Ireland

HIS3033: That great catastrophe: the Irish Famine of the 1840s

IRS1002:  Irish Studies II: the modern history, politics and social anthropology of Ireland

Postgraduate:

MHY7077: Public History Internship