Professor Michael Brown

Biography

Michael Brown is a historian of Ireland, Scotland and Britain more widely, with particular interest in the Enlightenment and the political culture of the eighteenth century. He is the Co-Director of the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies.

Awarded a Personal Chair in Irish, Scottish and Enlightenment History in 2014, Professor Brown was appointed to a lectureship at Aberdeen in 2006 and promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2011. A graduate of Trinity College Dublin, where he studied history for his BA (Mod) and PhD, he has worked at the Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies and the Department of Modern History at Trinity and in the Combined Departments of History at University College Dublin. He lectures regularly in Britain, Ireland, and North America. 

Research Overview

Professor Brown's work primarily concerns the Irish and Scottish Enlightenments. He is also interested in the interaction between religious, political and ethical ideas in the eighteenth century. This work is enhanced by the study of the political cultures of Britain and Ireland. Alongside contributions to intellectual history, he has edited collections on religious, legal and literary history. His method is often comparative and interdisciplinary, with a focus on imaginative and philosophical writings. 

Current Research

Professor Brown is now writing a textbook for Routledge entitled A Cultural History of Europe, 1688-1914: The Birth of Modernity. He is also working on a collection of essays provisionally entitled Making Up Britain in the Eighteenth Century.

He is editing, with Jack Hill, a collection of essays on Adam Ferguson for Aberdeen University Press, and, with Karin Freidrich, The Routledge History of the Enlightenment.

Past Research

Professor Brown's study of The Irish Enlightenment was published in April 2016 by Harvard University Press. Writing in The Irish Times (18 June 2016), Richard Kearney wrote ‘Over the course of 600 pages of sumptuous scholarship … the author demonstrates the existence of a significant Enlightenment project in Ireland in the 18th century.’ In Standpoint (July/August 2016), David Womersley stated ‘this is exemplary history. It both reformulates an important problem, and draws swathes of new material into the scholarly conversation.’ Jonathan Israel in the American Historical Review described the book as ‘detailed, thoughtful and important’. Colin Kidd, writing in Eighteenth-Century Ireland (2017) declared the work a ‘landmark volume’ and described it as ‘stunningly plotted and exquisitely patterned’. Lee Ward concluded his assessment in The Review of Politics, by stating ‘the portrait of an intellectually vibrant colonial Ireland that Brown offers is an early illustration of one of the central political phenomena of the twentieth century’.

He is the author of two other monographs: A Political Biography of John Toland (London; Pickering & Chatto, 2012; paperback Routledge: London, 2016) and Francis Hutcheson in Dublin, 1719-1730 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2002).

He has a long track record in collaborative work, which includes The Law and Other Legalities of Ireland, 1689-1850 (Farnham; Ashgate Press, 2011), edited with Seán Patrick Donlan and Converts and Conversion in Ireland, 1650-1850 (Dublin; Four Courts Press, 2005) with Charles Ivar MacGrath and Thomas Power. 

He also has experience in editing scholarly journals. He spent five years as the general editor of the interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal, Eighteenth-Century Ireland (2001-2005) and is currently an editor of the Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies (2006 to the present).

Collaborations

Professor Brown is a commissioning editor of the series Poetry and Song in the Age of Revolution (2011 ongoing, 7 volumes to date) which was first  published by Pickering & Chatto Press and is now with Routledge. Both United Islands? The Languages of Resistance (London; Pickering & Chatto, 2012; Paperback Routledge: London, 2016) and The Cultures of Radicalism in Britian and Ireland (London; Pickering & Chatto, 2013; Paperback: Routledge, 2016), are edited with John Kirk and Andrew Noble as part of this sequence. 

Non-course Teaching Responsibilities

Professor Brown supervises PhD students with an interest in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and Irish history, with a particular interest in Enlightenment ideas and political identities.