Diarmuid Scully

Lecturer in medieval history, University College Cork
Diarmuid Scully devised the first module on LGBT history to be taught in an Irish university in 2018, the 25th anniversary of the decriminalisation of homosexuality in the Republic.

The study of LGBT Irish identities on the island of Ireland is an emergent research area with huge potential. Modern Ireland, North and South, has seen many transformations, but few as dramatic as the change in the perception and status of LGBT people.

The module explores the experiences of LGBT people and the shaping of LGBT identities in Ireland from the 1970s to 2022 via activists’ testimonies, LGBT rights promotional materials, media reports, personal accounts, and creative productions including songs, poems and the visual arts. These sources are located and analysed in their historical contexts. The module also asks how, and to what extent, Irish LGBT issues have been analysed by historians.

My research interests focus on representations of Ireland, its inhabitants, and wonders in a wider archipelagic context in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Early Modern era. I am interested in Classical ideas concerning Britain, Ireland, and their surrounding seas, and the shaping of those ideas by Graeco-Roman world-geographical and ethnographical thought and the demands of Roman imperialism. The analysis of the long-term legacy of these concepts, topoi, and stereotypes dominates my current research. I am investigating their transmission to the early Insular world and adaptation and subversion by Insular authorities, and the response of twelfth to seventeenth century English and other textual and visual sources to both Classical and early Insular interpretations of Irish and archipelagic history, culture, geography, and marvels.

My research interests converge in a monograph in preparation, The Bull of the Herd: Giraldus Cambrensis and the Invention of Barbarian Ireland. This is the first full-length study of Gerald of Wales's Irish writings since 1662. Gerald of Wales's Topography of Ireland (1188) dominated discourse on Ireland from the late 12th to the 17th centuries. I am examining the work in relation to the Classical and Early Insular sources as well as 12th century views of European peripheries, and considering its impact on Early Modern perceptions of Ireland.