Professor Colin Barr

Professor Collin Barr is the Parnell Fellow at Magdalene.

Professor Barr is the Thomas Moore and Judy Livingston Director of the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies and professor of modern Irish history in the Keough School of Global Affairs. He joined the University of Notre Dame faculty in 2022, having previously been a faculty member at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland.

He was born in Canada and raised near Seattle. He holds a BA from Stonehill College and a PhD from the University of Cambridge, where he was a member of Gonville and Caius College. He has held academic appointments in Ireland, the United States, and the United Kingdom. He has been a Visiting Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge and the University of Newcastle, Australia, and Parnell Fellow at Magdelene College, Cambridge. He is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Professor Barr’s work seeks to place the history of the island of Ireland and its peoples in the widest possible context, including that of the United Kingdom, the continent of Europe, the Roman Catholic Church, and the global Irish Diaspora. He is the author or editor of a number of books, including Ireland’s Empire: The Roman Catholic Church in the English-speaking World, 1829-1914 (Cambridge University Press, 2020), The European Culture Wars in Ireland: The Callan Schools Affair, 1868-1881 (University College Dublin Press, 2010), Paul Cullen, John Henry Newman, and the Catholic University of Ireland, 1845-65 (University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), Nation/Nazione: Irish Nationalism and the Italian Risorgimento (co-edited with Michele Finelli and Anne O’Connor; University College Dublin Press, 2014), and Religion and Greater Ireland: Christianity and Irish Global Networks, 1750-1950 (co-edited with Hilary M. Carey; McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015). Professor Barr’s next book, The Irish Pope: Paul Cullen, 1803-1878, will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2026.