Rob O'Sullivan

I am a PhD student working with Professor Gary Gerstle. I work on the history of Irish-American newspaper editors and their reporting on European imperialism and revolutionary nationalism, 1840-1865. My PhD examines how different papers constructed a sense of identity, and shaped a collective understanding of Irish history, through commentaries in the Irish-American press on European nationalism, anti-Catholicism and imperialism. I explore how Irish-American journalists debated major global events, such as the 1848 Revolutions, the Hungarian nationalist movement and Kossuth’s tour of the USA, the Crimean War, the Opium Wars, the Indian Rebellion of 1857, and Italian Unification, and how these events shaped how Irish-Americans understood what it meant to be Irish in the United States. My work also considers how these global events contextualised how the Irish-American newspapers experienced domestic developments, from the Mexican War until the Civil War. 

I completed a Cambridge Trust funded MPhil (2020) at the University of Cambridge. My MPhil thesis explored Irish-American commentaries on the Greek War of Independence (1821-1832) and Poland's Revolution of 1830–31 against the Russian Empire. I received my BA in History from Cambridge University in 2019. My undergraduate thesis won the Gladstone Memorial Prize for the most meritorious Part II dissertation submitted by a candidate in the Faculty of Economics, Faculty of History and Department of Politics and International Studies, and the Junior Sara Norton Prize for the best Undergraduate Dissertation in American History.

I am the Student Convenor of the Modern Irish History Seminar. In 2021-22, I was a co-Convenor of the Cambridge History of Memory and Emotions Workshop.