Profile
Biography
BA (TCD), PhD (York)
Catriona Kennedy is a Reader in Modern British and Irish history. Her most recent book, Women, Politics, and the Irish Public Sphere in the Age of Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2025) explores how women from different social and religious backgrounds navigated late eighteenth-century Ireland intense ideological conflicts.
Catriona’s current project is a study of the master-servant relationship in eighteenth-century Ireland. It explores the place of domestic servants within the quotidian landscape and cultural and political imaginary of penal-era Ireland.
Departmental roles
Undergraduate Admissions Tutor
Research
Overview
Catriona’s research to date has focused on Irish and British history in the long eighteenth century with a particular emphasis on gender, radicalism, confessional relations, and warfare. She has been particularly concerned with how key moments in Irish and British history are reframed when viewed from the perspective of marginalised groups: What did the nation mean to the ordinary soldier in the Napoleonic wars? How does the integration of women challenge our conception of what it means to be revolutionary? How might a focus on servants and domestic space rewrite our understanding of the accommodations and frictions that characterised penal-era Ireland?
From 2005 to 2008, Catriona was a post-doctoral researcher on the AHRC-DFG co-funded project The Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars in European Experience and Memory. The resulting monograph, Narratives of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars: Military and Civilian Experience in Britain and Ireland, 1793-1815 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) studied the experiences of combatants, civilians and prisoners of war from across the four nations of the British Isles and the making and reshaping of gendered and national identities in the context of revolutionary upheaval and global warfare. A collection of essays, co-edited with Matthew McCormack, Soldiering in Britain and Ireland, 1750-1850. Men of Arms (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) further explored ‘soldiering’ as an activity, an identity, a career, and a way of life in this period.
Between 2013 and 2016, Catriona was Principal Investigator on the HERA-funded project Making War, Mapping Europe: Militarized Cultural Encounters, 1792-1920 and supervisor for a post-doctoral project based in York researching the visual and material culture of British military encounters with Egypt between 1798 and 1918.
Catriona’s second monograph, Women, Politics, and the Irish Public Sphere in the Age of Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2025), provides the first book-length study of women’s engagement with radical and revolutionary politics in late eighteenth-century Ireland. Revising a stubborn tendency to present women as satellites of their male relatives’ ideological planets, it maps instead the intellectual and political orbits in which Irishwomen moved and the distinctive concerns that shaped their responses to the challenges of the 1790s.
Catriona is currently working on her third monograph Master and Servant in Eighteenth-Century Ireland, the initial research for which was funded by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship award between 2020-1. This will be the first extended study of the history and representation of the master-servant relationship in the penal era (c. 1691-1829). It will explore the tensions and contradictions embedded within the Ascendancy regime by analysing the place of domestic servants – both real and figurative – in the social landscape and political imaginary of penal-era Ireland.
PhD Supervision
- Families in arms: British military families and the experience of war
- Northern British Provincial Theatre: Sociability and Social Networks, c. 1770-1832.
- The World in Mind: Women Writers, Improvement, and Environmental Thought, 1770-1830.
Teaching
Undergraduate
An example of modules taught:
- HIS0016I Gender, Enlightenment, and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century Europe
- HIS00125I Historical Thinking
- HIS00192H Ireland in the Age of Revolution
- HIS00216H Emotions
Postgraduate
An example of modules taught:
- History from below stairs: domestic servants in Britain and Ireland, c. 1650-1850