‘”The American Revolution” and America’s Revolution’ by Patrick Griffin, Madden-Hennebry Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame

FieldEarly American History, Atlantic History and Irish-America

ProfilePatrick Griffin was named the Madden-Hennebry Professor in 2008. He comes to Notre Dame from the University of Virginia. More precisely, he returns to Notre Dame. Griffin holds a BA from Notre Dame, an MA from Columbia University, and a PhD from Northwestern University. His work explores the intersection of colonial American and early modern Irish and British history. As such, it focuses on Atlantic-wide themes and dynamics. He has published work on what we could call conventional Irish-American history-the study of the movement of peoples and cultures from Ireland to America, as well as the process of adaptation-but he also examines the ways in which Ireland and America were linked-and differed-during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He has looked at revolution and rebellion, movement and migration, and colonization and conquest in each society in comparative perspective.

Current ProjectGriffin is working now on two other projects: a comparative study of the colonization and transformation of Ireland and Virginia during the seventeenth century; and a biography of Sir William Johnson, an Irish Catholic-born British official who was regarded by the Mohawk as one of their own and who also became an architect of British empire in America at the time of the Seven Years’ War.

Noted PublicationsThe People with No Name: Ireland’s Ulster Scots, America’s Scots Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World (Princeton, 2001)American Leviathan: Empire, Nation, and Revolutionary Frontier (New York, 2007)