Ciara Breathnach

• Professor of Irish Gender History, University College Cork

Ciara Breathnach is Professor of Irish Gender History at University College Cork. She has published widely on Irish socio-economic, gender, cultural and health history. Her last monograph Ordinary lives, death and social class: Dublin City Coroner's Court, 1876-1902 (Oxford University Press, 2022) won the American Conference of Irish Studies, James S. Donnelly Sr. Prize for Books on History and Social Sciences in 2023. From a methodological perspective, Ordinary Lives made extensive use of the 1901 census to anchor the study of some of Dublin City's poorest inhabitants. The historical 1901 and 1911 censuses were critical primary sources for three sole authored articles published in Annales de démographie (September, 2022), History Workshop Journal (2025), and the Historical Journal (2026), and a co-authored piece with in Urban History with Rachel Murphy (2024). Her current monograph is Absence in the Archives and it will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2026. To extend her research impact beyond the academy, over the past 15 years, Breathnach has contributed to over twenty-five documentaries, in both the English and Irish languages.

Breathnach is Vice Chair of a European funded COST Action CA22116 The Great Leap. Multidisciplinary Approaches to Health Inequalities, 1800-2022. She has held 10 international fellowships including a Fulbright at New York University (2022), at Harvard University (2014, and more recently at the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford (2023/24). She has served as a member of Heritage Council (2012-2016), the Board of the National Library (2015-2020), National Archives Advisory Council (2017-2022), she is currently a member of the Irish Manuscripts Commission (2017-2027), and the Editorial board of the Dictionary of Irish Biography (2020-).

• –present Professor of Irish Gender History, University College Cork

• 2003 University College Cork, PhD in History

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