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Member profile: William Sheehan

Senior Arts Faculty Manager and Associate Lecturer in History with the Open University

Biography

I am a Senior Arts Faculty Manager with the Open University and am based in Nottingham, I am also an Associate Lecturer on our MA in Local and Regional History and previously taught on A326: Empire, and I have also taught at Mary Immaculate College, Griffith College Cork, NUI Maynooth, and University College Cork. I am a graduate of University College Cork, the University of Limerick, and Mary Immaculate College.

Research

My research interests include the history of European imperialism, with particular reference to colonial counter- insurgency campaigns of the 1920s and 1930s. I also have an interest in nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and Irish social and economic history, especially crime and policing history.

I am researching British counter-insurgency operations in response to the Saya San Rebellion in Burma from 1930 to 1931, looking at the operations of the Indian Army and the Burmese Military Police. This work builds on research undertaken for a research project on the development of British counter-insurgency in Ireland during the Irish War of Independence.

I am also researching the history of urban crime in Cork City from 1892 to 1914. Much criminal and police history in Ireland has focused on rural crime, including agrarian violence. This research project examines patterns of urban crime in a major Irish city, using this as the basis of a study on Irish society in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. This will be the first major study of Irish urban crime in this period.

Key Publications

  • A Hard Local War: The British Army and the Guerrilla War in Cork 1919-21 (The History Press, 2011)
  • Riotous Assemblies: Riots, Rebels and Revolts (Mercier Press, 2011)
  • Hearts & Mines: The History of the 5th Division in Ireland, 1920 to 1922 (Collins Press, 2009)
  • Fighting for Dublin: The British Battle for Dublin 1919-1921 (Collins Press, 2007)
  • British Voices from the Irish War of Independence (Collins Press, 2005)