Lecture: Enda Delaney, "Out of Time: Ireland and Colonial Modernity"

Please join the Keough-Naughton Institute for a lecture by Prof. Enda Delaney. This lecture, titled Out of Time: Ireland and Colonial Modernity, is drawn from Delaney's recent book Making Ireland Modern: The Transformation of Society and Culture (Oxford University Press, 2025). 

There is a widespread misconception that Ireland became "modern" much later than its neighbors, in the 1960s and 1970s. This is grounded in several enduring stereotypes and caricatures: of Ireland as a "timeless" and unchanging "land of saints and scholars"; of its society and culture in the long nineteenth century as puritanical, regressive, or archaic; of Gaelic language and culture as "backward" or inward-looking in contrast to a "modern" English counterpart; and of the island as natural and rural in the face of the urban and technological "progress" of modernity. 

Drawing on an extensive range of sources, Enda Delaney offers a reinterpretation of Ireland's encounter with modernity that corrects these stereotypes. By situating the island's history between 1780 and 1916 within its broader European, global, and colonial contexts, he demonstrates that Ireland's pathway to modernity was not inevitable, belated, or linear: over a complex and centuries-long process it was made modern, and in its own distinctive way. This was related to, but distinct from, Ireland's complicated colonial relationship with Britain, and played out in the broader contexts of globalization and the rise of capitalism. And at the heart of this history are the Irish people themselves, both those who lived on the island and the millions who left during this period and made their lives in Britain, America, Australia, and beyond, who made sense of modernity in a variety of conflicting ways and, in so doing, sought to shape their own destinies and adapt the "old" ways of doing things in the face of relentless waves of "progress". Changes in values, consciousness, and beliefs interacted with broader social, political, and cultural revolutions to create a distinctive experience of becoming modern.

About Enda Delaney

Enda Delaney is a professor at the University of Edinburgh, where he holds a Chair in Modern History, and is the Director of Research at the Edinburgh Features Institute (2024-26). He studies modernity in comparative historical contexts, with particular interests in modern Ireland and the diaspora since 1750. Some other topics of interest are the the history of human cognition and culture, and the “deep” history of the Anthropocene, which extends beyond the traditional boundaries of the discipline to include the pre-history of humans.

Some of his publications include Making Ireland Modern: The Transformation of Society and Culture (Oxford University Press, 2025); The Great Irish Famine: A History in Four Lives (Gill and Macmillan, 2014); The Irish in Post-war Britain (Oxford University Press, 2007); and the edited volume with Fearghal McGarry, The Irish Revolution 1919 -21: A Global History (Wordwell, 2019). Professor Delaney was Co-Principal Investigator on the recently completed UK Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project, A Global History of the Irish Revolution, 1916-1923, which has produced a range of publications.

Originally published at irishstudies.nd.edu.