Tuesday 29 November at 8.15pm in the Sheraton Hotel

Talk by Dr John Gibney

Summary Documents on Irish Foreign Policy publishes archival records relating to Ireland’s foreign relations since 1919. Established as a partnership between the Royal Irish Academy, the Department of Foreign Affairs and the National Archives, since 1998 it has provided a perspective on Irish and international history through the eyes of Irish diplomats and with the imminent publication of Vol.XIII it has reached 1969. But how do we edit these volumes, what do we include and why do we include it, and what do the documents reveal? This lecture will answer these questions by exploring what the series reveals about the upheaval of the 1960s in the United States as seen and experienced by Irish diplomats.

Speaker John Gibney is Assistant Editor with the Royal Irish Academy’s Documents on Irish Foreign Policy (DIFP) series. He is a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin (BA, PhD), and was formerly a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Notre Dame and at NUI Galway. He has worked extensively in tourism and in the heritage and publishing sectors, and has written widely on modern and early modern Irish history and historiography. His books include A short history of Ireland, 1500-2000 (Yale University Press, 2017).