Professor Marc Mulholland
Tutor in Modern History
St Catherine's College
Marc Mulholland was born in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, in 1971, and as a one-year old moved with his family to Portglenone, County Antrim. He comes from a long line of school-teachers on his mother's side. His father worked as a Head Forester, so he grew up in the publicly-owned Portglenone Forest. His earliest distinct 'public' memories include the death of Elvis and the 1981 Hunger Strikes that shook strife-torn Northern Ireland. Marc went to school at St Louis Grammar, Ballymena, where he discovered the joys of political disputation. He took his undergraduate degree in History (following a mis-step with Law) at Queen's University Belfast. At the same institution Marc took a MA in Irish History, and then wrote a PhD thesis, under the supervision of Dr. Alvin Jackson, on Ulster Unionism in the 1960s. Upon finishing his PhD, Marc wrote a centenary history of Holywell Psychiatric Hospital, County Antrim. In 1998 he left Ireland for Oxford, where he held an Irish Government Post-Doctoral Scholarship. Marc taught, inter alia, for Queen's University Belfast; the Open University; Birkbeck College, London; Bristol University; and Pembroke College, Oxford, before securing a College and University Fellowship attached to St Catherine's College, Oxford, in 2000. In terms of scholarly interest, Marc is bifurcated: Irish history since the Great Famine on the one hand; the history of political thought since the French Revolution, on the other. He is somewhat averse to narrow specialisation, and particularly enjoys the wide scope for teaching across themes and periods afforded by the Oxford system.
Research Interests
- Ireland
- Social classes
- Peasantry
- Socialism
- Revolution
In Irish history, I look at the 'national question' (almost inevitably). This has included studies of the Press, of Ulster Unionism, and of the Provisional IRA. I have written a biography of Terence O'Neill, Prime Minister of Northern Ireland from 1963 to 1969. I have recently published a large book on the history of the Irish peasantry.
I am interested in the role of 'human nature' in historical process.
Publications
At the Rising of the Moon
(September 2025)
At the Rising of the Moon is a sweeping history of a time in Ireland during which the old social order of lordship and tribal property was smashed and erected on its ruins was a social structure of peasants and landlords. From the 1760s, the Irish peasantry developed a uniquely vigorous and continuous tradition of resistance and rebellion against landlord power that laid the foundations of the political upheaval that followed. More than this, this magisterial work illuminates the importance of a common human nature in an always changing social and cultural landscape.
DPhil Students
I would like to hear from potential DPhil students or any potential Masters students looking at modern Irish history of socialism