35th IRISH CONFERENCE OF HISTORIANS

Inner Lives and Outer Realities

Hosted by the Irish Committee of Historical Sciences & Maynooth University Department of History

How does the individual experience history? How are lives lived against the backdrop of conflict and revolutions, of social transformation and religious change? Such questions raise a central issue of historical interpretation – that concerning the relationship between the exercise of individual agency and the circumscribing influence of social, political and cultural context. This relationship – or perhaps, more accurately, this tension – was famously captured by Karl Marx: ‘men make their own history,’ he observed, ‘but they do not make it as they please’. Taking a lead from Emma Rothschild’s 2011 study, The inner life of empires, a book which uses a single family to explore the revolutionary transformations – political, intellectual and imperial – of the eighteenth century, the 2025 Irish Conference of Historians seeks to interrogate this relationship through a wide variety of prisms.

Location: Maynooth University, Middle Loftus, I Divinity & Renehan Hall (South campus)

Date: 12-13 September 2025

See: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/35th-irish-conference-of-historians-inner-lives-and-outer-realities-tickets-1571797672149?aff=oddtdtcreator