Oakes Faculty Fellows

Research Interests

U.S. immigration and working-class history, with a particular focus on the Irish experience in America; ethnicity and race in U.S. history, including the history of movements for racial justice; transnational history of diasporic radicalisms; Irish history and politics.

Biography, Education and Training

B.A. Reed College
M.A. University of Warwick
Ph.D. UCLA

Honors, Awards and Grants

• Choice Magazine Outstanding Academic Title for 2016
• President, Southwest Labor Studies Association, 2008-2012 
• National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend, 2009
• UCSC Social Sciences "Golden Apple" Outstanding Teaching Award, 1997
• Choice Magazine Outstanding Academic Title for 1994

Selected Publications

• "W. E. B. Du Bois and the Irish Revolution: Anticolonial Activism in New York, 1916-1920," in Patrick Mannion and Fearghal McGarry, eds., The Irish Revolution:  A Global History (New York: New York University Press, 2022), 400-424.
• "Irish Revolution and American Empire: Frank Walsh’s ‘American Imperialism,’" in Darragh Gannon and Fearghal McGarry (eds.), Ireland 1922: Independence, Partition, Civil War. (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2022), 43-47.
• "A Roundtable on Lucy Salyer’s Under the Starry Flag,” with Paul A. Kramer, Amy S. Greenberg, Daniel Margolies, Torrie Hester, and Lucy Salyer. Passport: The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Review 51, No. 1 (April 2020): 8-18.
• Irish Nationalists in America: The Politics of Exile, 1798-1998 (Oxford University Press, 2016; paperback 2019).
• "A Tale of Two Cities: Exporting the Irish Revolution to Chicago and Buenos Aires," History Ireland  (2019): 61-64.
• "Lala Lajpat Rai, Indian Nationalism, and the Irish Revolution: The View from New York, 1914-1920," in Enrico Dal Lago, Róisín Healy, and Gearóid Barry (eds.), 1916 in Global Context: An Anti-Imperial Moment  (Routledge, 2018), 62-75.
• "Irish American Working Class," Oxford Research Encyclopedia in American History (Oxford University Press, October 2017).
• "Donald Trump and Enda Kenny Celebrate a Tense St. Patrick’s Day," The Conversation, March 15, 2017.
• "Remembering 1916 in America: The Easter Rising's Many Faces, 1919-1962," in Richard Grayson and Fearghal McGarry (eds.),  Remembering 1916: The Easter Rising, the Somme and the Politics of Memory (Cambridge University Press, 2016), 138-52.
• "Allegiance, Dual Citizenship and the Ethnic Influence on U.S. Foreign Policy," in Ronald Bayor (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of American Immigration and Ethnicity (Oxford University Press, 2016). (Also published on Oxford Handbooks Online, January 2014), 375-97.
• "The Easter Rising and New York's Anticolonial Nationalists," in Miriam Nyhan Grey (ed.), Ireland's Allies: America and the 1916 Easter Rising (University College Dublin Press, 2016), 347-59.
• "The Easter Rising 100 Years On: How the Irish Revolution Fired up American Politics," The Conversation, May 6, 2016.
• H-Diplo Rountable on David Sim, A Union Forever: The Irish Question and U.S. Foreign Relations in the Victorian Age 17 (November 2015).
• “Matilda Tone in America: Exile, Gender, and Memory in the Making of Irish Republican Nationalism,” New Hibernia Review 14 (Spring 2010): 96-111.
• “Recent Directions in the History of Irish American Nationalism,” Journal of American Ethnic History 28 (Summer 2009): 82-89.
• “American Labor Union” and “Gilded Age,” in Eric Arnesen (ed.), Encyclopedia of U.S. Labor and Working Class History (Routledge, 2007), 1:91-93, 2:521-27.
• “American Labour and the Irish Question, 1916-1923,” Saothar: Journal of the Irish Labour History Society 24 (1999): 59-66.
• "Irish Progressive League" and “Knights of Labor,” in Mari Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle, and Dan Georgakas (eds.), Encyclopedia of the American Left, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press, 1998), 387, 417-19.
• "'In Time of Peace, Prepare for War': Key Themes in the Social Thought of New York's Irish-American Nationalists, 1900-1916," in Ronald H. Bayor and Timothy J. Meagher (eds.), The New York Irish (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 321-34.
• The Making of Western Labor Radicalism: Denver's Organized Workers, 1878-1905 (University of Illinois Press, 1994). 
• "After the Land League: The Persistence of Irish-American Labor Radicalism in Denver, 1897-1905," Journal of American Ethnic History 11 (Spring 1992): 3-26.
• Who Built America? Working People & the Nation's Economy, Politics, Culture & Society, with Bruce Levine et al. (2 volumes, Pantheon, 1989-92).
• "Irish Land and American Workers: Class and Ethnicity in Denver, Colorado," in Dirk Hoerder (ed.), "Struggle a Hard Battle": Essays on Working-Class Immigrants (Northern Illinois University Press, 1986), 46-67.
• "The Producing Classes and the Saloon: Denver in the 1880s," Labor History 26 (Winter 1985): 29-52.

Selected Presentations

"Chicago: Second City of Irish American Nationalism," keynote talk, international conference on "Chicago: An Irish-American Metropolis? Politics, Ethnicity, and Culture from 1830s to the Present Time," The University of Chicago Center in Paris, June 2021.

Panel Discussion, "Centenary of the Irish Race Congress, Paris, 21-28 January 1922," History Ireland Hedge School Podcast, January 21, 2022.