Reid

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Colin Reid, PhD Student (BA, MA Belfast)
creid06@qub.ac.uk

Thesis

‘Stephen Gwynn: A Life in Irish Politics and Culture, 1864-1950’.

Stephen Gwynn was many things during his lifetime: writer, politician, soldier, journalist, poet, historian and biographer. He was the nationalist MP for Galway between the turbulent years of 1906-1918; his political career coincided with the rise and fall of the constitutional nationalist project of securing Home Rule for Ireland. Gwynn was a major figure within the Irish Parliamentary Party: close to its leader, John Redmond, and as the chief propagandist, he was close to the pulse of Irish nationalism before the radical Sinn Féin crushed his party at the polls in 1918. Yet Stephen Gwynn’s nationalism was very different from most within the IPP: he was a Protestant advocate of Home Rule, whose nationalism was derived not from a political sense, but largely from a love of Ireland’s natural landscapes and beauty.

With over fifty books, numerous magazine articles and astute political commentaries in various newspapers over his lifetime, Gwynn was an industrious writer. Taken together, these publications give a unique insight into the political, social and cultural thought of one of the more progressive Irish nationalists of the early twentieth-century. My research will tie together Gwynn’s written work with archive material and contemporary sources to construct a biography of one of Ireland’s lost leaders of the Home Rule generation, outlining his contribution to Irish political and literary life over the course of his long and rich life.

Areas of Research

My primary research interests concern Irish politics and history, with particular focus on nineteenth- and twentieth-century political and cultural history. This includes Irish political thought; the role of Irish literature; the evolution of nationalist and unionist politics; and the development of the two Irelands post-partition.

Supervisors:  Professor Paul Bew and Dr Margaret O’Callaghan