Nation-Nazione brings together scholars of Ireland and Italy to examine the multiple intersections, impacts, and influences that flowed between Italy and Ireland, and Italian and Irish nationalists, in the nineteenth century. By locating both Irish and Italian history in their wider European and comparative contexts, the book contributes to a fuller understanding of the national movements of both places, and the often surprising and unexpected intersections from electoral politics to culture to military force, as well as the abiding impact of Italian events, myths, and personalities in Ireland, and Irish in Italy. For Irish historians, it questions the image of Irish isolation or exceptionalism, just as it reminds Italians that the most distant corners of Europe impacted on their own national history. The first book to comprehensively address this topic, Nation/Nazione will open entirely new fields of research for scholars.

How did the Irish stay Irish? Why are Irish and Catholic still so often synonymous in the English-speaking world? Ireland's Empire is the first book to examine the complex relationship between Irish migrants and Roman Catholicism in the nineteenth century on a truly global basis. Drawing on more than 100 archives on five continents, Colin Barr traces the spread of Irish Roman Catholicism across the English-speaking world and explains how the Catholic Church became the vehicle for Irish diasporic identity in the United States, Australia, Canada, South Africa, New Zealand, Newfoundland, and India between 1829 and 1914. The world these Irish Catholic bishops, priests, nuns, and laity created endured long into the twentieth century, and its legacy is still present today.

"The European Culture Wars in Ireland" tells the story of Father Robert O'Keeffe of Callan, County Kilkenny, and his conflict with ecclesiastical authority. O'Keeffe's serial lawsuits against his own curates, his bishop, and the cardinal archbishop of Dublin, and his consequent removal as manager of a number of national schools and chaplain of the local workhouse, commanded attention across Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the world. In Callan, the town split into warring camps, and riot became a part of life for nearly ten years - the colourful local details eventually inspired two novelists. To contemporaries, Callan and O'Keeffe mattered because they seemed to be an Irish manifestation of a global Catholic-secular culture war that encompassed both the definition of papal infallibility and the German Kulturkampf. For a time, the Callan Schools dominated British political debate, and O'Keeffe secured a private meeting with Prime Minister William Gladstone. Political fury at his removal from publicly funded positions at the behest of clerical authority nearly wrecked the Irish system of national education. In May 1873, the libel trial O'Keeffe v. Cullen saw the competing claims of canon and civil law tested in spectacularly public fashion as the island's first Roman Catholic cardinal was tried before the Queen's Bench. "The European Culture Wars in Ireland" traces the Callan Schools Affair from its origins in 1868 to O'Keeffe's death in 1881. It examines not only the riotous local events and the spectacular libel trial in Dublin, but also the complex and politically charged response of the British state. A new departure in Irish historiography, the book argues that Robert O'Keeffe and his grievances could only become both cause celebre and constitutional crisis because the United Kingdom as a whole was an integral part of Europe, responsive to and influenced by continental concerns.

The history of the Catholic University of Ireland has long been overshadowed by the personality and writings of its first rector, John Henry Newman. Newman—an official candidate for sainthood and author of the renowned The Idea of a University—played a vital role in the foundation of the university. But Colin Barr’s new study paints a richer portrait of CUI’s history by focusing on the university itself and on the influence of Paul Cullen, archbishop of Armagh and then Dublin.Most historians have based their treatments of the Catholic University of Ireland on Newman’s own voluminous correspondence and later writings, and have tended to uncritically accept Newman’s own understanding of his role in Dublin and his relationship with Cullen. Newman has been cast in the role of a liberal, creative visionary who was frustrated at every turn by the obscurantist, ultramontane Cullen. Barr seeks to reassess Cullen’s role in the founding and history of the University by utilizing previously unavailable sources and by relocating the history of the Catholic University in its Irish context.Paul Cullen, John Henry Newman, and the Catholic University of Ireland, 1845-1865 presents a more balanced treatment of both the University and of Newman and Cullen’s role in its history. The resulting text is a fascinating story of determination, conflict, and failure.