DR CIARAN O'SCEA

Ciaran O’Scea is a postdoctoral research fellow at the John Hume Institute for Global Irish Studies, and the School of Archives and History, UCD. His PhD, which he completed at the European University Institute, Florence in 2007, dealt with the construction, and transformation of the Irish community in Galicia in the north-west of Spain across a range of socio-cultural aspects during the first half of the seventeenth century.

The effects of transformed family and kinship structures on Irish identity in Irish communities in early modern Europe and in Ireland

Aims  

1. To compare how Gaelic Irish, Old English, and ‘Hiberno English’ family and kinship structures evolved under the influence of English and continental European legal systems during the course of the seventeenth century.

2. To analyse the impact of these changes on Irish identity across a range of socio-cultural and economic aspects.

This project, which is based off Spanish, French, and English archival sources, traces the effects of transformed family and kinship structures on family and population size, the role of women, affective ties within the family, traditional concepts of honour and nobility, and networks of patronage. In the process it has shown the distorting effects that the Spanish, French, and English administrations had on the traditional socio-political hierarchies especially in regards to concepts of honour and nobility.

Publications

• ‘Irish Wills from Galicia, 1592-1666’. Archivium Hibernicum 56 (2002), pp 73-131.
• ‘Irish emigration to Castile in the opening years of the seventeenth century’. To and from Ireland: Planned Migration Schemes c. 1600-2000 (Dublin, 2004, Geography Publications), pp 17-38.
• ‘The role of Castilian royal bureaucracy in the formation of early  modern Irish literacy’. Irish communities in early modern Europe (Dublin, 2006, Four Courts Press), pp 200-39.
• ‘The search for immigrant rights and naturalisation papers among Irish emigrants in early modern Spain(1598-1665)’. Emigrants and exiles from the Three Kingdoms in Europe, 1603-1688  (Leiden, Brill, 2010), pp 107-24.
• ‘Nominación de los irlandeses en España, rechazo y asimilación (1600-1680)’. Nombres, un juego de engaños. Nominación, movilidad, y antroponimia, siglos XV-XVIII (Madrid, Casa de Velázquez, 2010), pp 121-38.
• ‘From Munster to La Coruña across the Celtic Sea: emigration, assimilation and acculturation in the kingdom of Galicia (1601-40)’. Obradoiro de Historia Moderna (Santiago de Compostela) 19 (2010), pp 9-37.
  
  

Contact Details
Email: ciaran.oscea@ucd.ie
UCD John Hume Institute for Global Irish Studies
University College Dublin
Belfield
Dublin 4
Ireland