William Murphy

My primary field of research is modern Irish history, with a particular expertise in the history of the Irish revolutionary period. To date this work has centred on three key areas, the history of political imprisonment, the history of sport and leisure, and the history of female suffragism.

That first interest is reflected in a series of articles and in the monograph Political Imprisonment and the Irish, 1912-1921 (Oxford University Press, 2014). My current research includes further work on political prisoners which will contribute to a project entitled 'Prisoners, Medical Care and Entitlement to Health in England and Ireland, 1850-2000'. This project was awarded a Senior Investigator Award by the Wellcome Trust in 2014. I was a co-applicant and am now a senior member of the team. The Principal Investigators are Dr Catherine Cox (University College Dublin) and Professor Hilary Marland (University of Warwick).

My second monograph is Michael Collins: the man and the revolution (The Collins Press, 2018), co-authored with Anne Dolan (Trinity College Dublin).
I am co-founder with Dr Paul Rouse (University College Dublin) of Sports History Ireland and co-editor of two collections on the history of sport and leisure. The relationship of sport to the Irish revolution is a particular interest while I am also interested in the relationship of the history of sport to wider histories of leisure and popular culture.

My work is also engaged with suffragist strategies of resistance, including census boycott and prison protest.