Members

Marta Ramon Garcia is associate lecturer at the Department of English, French and German Philology at the University of Oviedo. Before her arrival in Oviedo in 2009 she was attached to the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, successively as a postdoctoral fellow, tutor and junior lecturer.

As a historian of nineteenth-century Ireland her published work has focused on Irish and Irish-American revolutionary nationalism, especially Young Ireland and the Fenian movement, between the 1840s and the 1890s. Her main publications in this area are the monograph A Provisional Dictator: James Stephens and the Fenian Movement (UCD Press, 2007), the annotated editions The Birth of the Fenian Movement: James Stephens’s American Diary, Brooklyn, 1859 (UCD Press, 2009) and The Faith of a Felon and Other Writings, by James Fintan Lalor (UCD Press, 2012), and the edited volume by Brian Heffernan et al (eds.) Life on the Fringe? Ireland and Europe between 1800 and 1922 (Irish Academic Press, 2012).

Over the last few years her interest has shifted to the fields of temperance, rational recreation and working-class self-improvement schemes, with particular focus on the Dublin Mechanics’ Institute, one of the main hubs of Dublin’s civic life. This is the topic of her recent article ‘“A Local Habitation and a Name”: The Dublin Mechanics’ Institute and the Evolution of Dublin’s Public Sphere, 1824–1904’, in Irish Economic and Social History 46.1 (2019): 22-4.

Her most recent lines of research are the provision of public parks to Dublin’s working classes and the changing perceptions of alcoholism during the long nineteenth century on the part of temperance activists, reformers and the medical profession. She is interested to explore the connection between science, ideology and public health schemes.