Dr. Irene Whelan has taught at Manhattanville College since 1990. A native of County Galway on Ireland’s west coast, she was educated at the National University of Ireland - Galway and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she studied with James S. Donnelly Jr., a leading historian of modern Ireland. Her dissertation on the evangelical movement in Ireland was published as The Bible War in Ireland: The ‘Second Reformation’ and the Polarization of Protestant-Catholic Relations, 1780-1840 in 2005. Her scholarly focus is on the intersection of religious and political history at the local, as well as the global level. She is currently engaged in co-editing a volume of essays, Landscape of Promise and Ruin: Culture, Identity and Reality in the Irish West, 1830-1930, as well a book-length study of the concept of an Irish ‘spiritual empire’ in the 19th and 20th centuries.

This podcast was produced by Aaron Lakoff.