Inaugural Lecture, Olwen Purdue, Professor of Modern Social History

This lecture will tell the stories of journeys made by men, women and children to and from Belfast workhouse in the opening years of the twentieth century. Through these stories, it will explore how we as historians approach and share the history of the people we research. What is our role and responsibility in deciding which stories are worthy of our attention and how they will be told, who will be included and who ignored? Where does power lie in the making of history?

It will examine the spaces in between, asking what happened in the sites of encounter between different social classes, between those in need and those in authority. And it will address the silences of the archives, silences that are the result of structural issues and power dynamics that have prevented many people’s histories from being recorded and shared. It will ask how might we as historians work today to address these silences, disrupt these power dynamics and include those about whom we write in the making of their own histories.

Olwen Purdue is Professor of Modern Social History and Director of the Centre for Public History at Queen’s, where she works on the social history of modern Ireland with a focus on urban poverty, welfare and social class. She is also an active public historian and has collaborated with a range of cultural and heritage organisations and communities locally and globally.

Olwen sits on the Council of the Royal Historical Society where she chairs the Research Support Committee and chaired the jury for the 2024 Whitfield Book Prize. She is President of the International Federation for Public History. She was a director of the Irish Museums Association (2020-24) and President of the Society for the Study of Nineteenth-Century Ireland (2018-22).

Her books include The Big House in the North of Ireland: Land, Power and Social Elites 1978-1960 (Dublin, 2009), Belfast: the emerging city 1850-1914 (Dublin, 2012), Urban Spaces in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (2018), Children, Poverty and the Poor Law in Industrial Belfast (Liverpool, 2024) and (with Leonie Hannan) Public History in Ireland: Difficult Histories (London, 2024). She has also published articles in a range of journal including Urban History, Family & Community History and Cultural & Social History. She was series editor for Liverpool University Press’ series on nineteenth century Ireland from 2018-2024 and is currently series editor for Routledge’s book series Global Perspectives in Public History.

This event is hosted by the School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics, Queen's University Belfast.

For any queries, please contact Lorna O'Connor ([email protected])

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