David Dickson will discuss his recent work on the emergence of Irish cities as significant places in European terms, reflecting on why they developed so rapidly in the eighteenth century and lost that dynamism in the nineteenth.    He will comment on the wider implications of his work and on current and future research in the field.

David Dickson retired from the Department of History in 2017 where for many decades he had taught modern Irish and African history.  He was PI in three major research programmes in these fields and supervised over 30 doctoral dissertations.  He has had a long-running interest in Irish urban history and regional development, and his publications include Old World Colony: Cork and South Munster 1630-1830 (Cork & Madison, 2005); Dublin: The Making of a Capital City (London & Cambridge, MA, 2014); and The First Irish Cities: An Eighteenth-Century Transformation (London & New Haven, 2021).’