Steven Ellis
Professor Ellis read History at Manchester University before working at the Institute of Irish Studies, Queen's University, Belfast. He joined the History Department in Galway in 1976, was awarded a personal chair in 1991, and was appointed to the established chair of History in 2009. He served as Head of History 2004-11, and is presently Head of the School of Humanities. Ellis’s writings have been published in ten countries and in eight languages. His early work focused on English society and institutions in Ireland. Since the mid-1980s a prominent aspect of his research has been the development of perspectives on Irish history in a British context and on Ireland as one of the Tudor borderlands. These perspectives were first explored in his Tudor Ireland, long the standard survey of the subject (extensively revised and extended for a new edition in 1998). More recently, he has also worked on his native north of England and on British state formation more generally. This work produced a pioneering analysis of marcher lordship and frontier society in the form of a monograph comparing Tudor Ireland and the English far north, and a comparative survey of early modern Britain and Ireland written from a ’New British’ perspective. In recent years, he has been working on frontiers and regions in a European context: his latest research has appeared in several edited volumes, particularly collections of essays associated with CLIOHRES, a Network of Excellence supported by the European Commission’s 6th Framework programme. At present, he is completing a comparative study of Meath and Northumberland as frontier societies in the early Tudor state.
