Ireland and the Tudor State
Channel: British Library
Date: 2022-02-21

The 16th century brought profound change to Ireland as the Tudor monarchs strove to complete the conquest begun some 400 years previously using a combination of social and cultural assimilation, military force and colonisation by Protestant English settlers.

Join our panel of experts as they look back on Tudor Ireland’s complex relationship with England, exploring Ireland before the accession of Elizabeth I in 1558, the impact her reign had for her ‘unwelcome inheritance’ and the legacy of these conflicted and troubled times.

Professor Susan Doran is Professor of Early Modern British History at the University of Oxford and Senior Research Fellow at Jesus College and St Benet’s Hall, Oxford. She has written numerous books, including Mary Queen of Scots, An Illustrated Life and Elizabeth I and Her Circle. She has edited a number of exhibition catalogues for the British Library including the one accompanying the exhibition, Elizabeth and Mary: Royal Cousin, Rival Queens.

Brendan Kane is Professor in the Departments of History and Literatures, Cultures and Languages at the University of Connecticut. His research focuses on Irish-English relations in the early modern period, particularly as revealed through the Irish-language archive. His publications include the co-edited collection Elizabeth I and Ireland and The Politics and Culture of Honour in Britain and Ireland, 1541-1641. Currently he serves as Vice-President/President-elect of the Celtic Studies Association of North America, an elected Council Member of the North American Conference on British Studies, and is founding co-director of Léamh.org: Learn Early Modern Irish (c. 1200-1650).



Professor Sparky Booker is a historian of law, culture and society in late medieval Ireland. She is an Assistant Professor in history at the School of History and Geography at Dublin City University. Sparky has published on many aspects of late medieval Irish history and is the author of Cultural Exchange and Identity in Late Medieval Ireland: the English and Irish of the Four Obedient Shires.This monograph was awarded the James S. Donnelly Prize and Donald Murphy Prize from the American Conference for Irish Studies in 2019. She is on the committee of the Friends of Medieval Dublin and the Irish Legal History Society.



Shafi Musaddique is a journalist covering British and Irish politics, with a focus on race, faith, identity, frontier cultures and marginalised communities. Shafi has worked for the BBC, NBC and The Economist among other publications both in the UK and in mainland Europe. Many of his stories are born from the multiple identities of growing up and living in the London borough of Camden, home to 130 languages, a large Irish contingent among them. Interests include unearthing untold stories, such as the impact of Ireland's uprising against the British on the movement for Indian independence, to cultural crossovers between the Islamic world and Europe.