Making Ireland English: How the Aristocracy Shaped Seventeenth-Century Ireland

The seventeenth century represented a political and social watershed in Irish history. Prof. Jane Ohlmeyer of Trinity College Dublin examines how the aristocracy — an ethnically and religiously diverse group that embraced some of the most influential men in early modern Ireland — helped to make Ireland English. A close analysis of Ireland's resident peerage provides us with a series of complex and, at times contradictory, stories of ruthless self aggrandizement, of pragmatic assimilation and mutation, and of a dogged determination to pursue agendas — in themselves often ambiguous — that enhanced social standing, material wealth and political power.

Professor Jane Ohlmeyer is Erasmus Smith's Professor of Modern History at Trinity College, Dublin. She is an expert on the New British and Atlantic Histories and has published widely on a number of themes in early modern Irish and British history. Her books include Civil War and Restoration in the Three Stuart Kingdoms (Cambridge, 1993); Ireland from Independence to Occupation, 1641-1660 (editor, Cambridge, 1995); and Political Thought in Seventeenth-Century Ireland (editor, Cambridge, 2000). Her new book is Making Ireland English: How the Aristocracy Shaped Seventeenth-Century Ireland, published in April 2012 with Yale University Press.

Introduction by Joe Lee, Glucksman Chair of Irish Studies, Professor of History, and Director of Glucksman Ireland House NYU.

RSVP to 212-998-3950 (option 3) or email [email protected].