Dr Justin Dolan Stover Moore Institute Visiting Fellow

Digitizing Revolutionary Violence against Irish Environments

Abstract:

The Irish Revolution demonstrates the importance of initiative, ingenuity, and familiarity with various landscapes and peoples as intangible necessities of guerrilla warfare. County-based studies of the Irish Revolution often confine these features to administrative and political boundaries, which fail to convey the truly organic complexity of revolutionary activism, violence, and environmental destruction. Natural features, such as mountains, bogs, and rivers, and spatial considerations, such as transportation routes and proximity to urban centres, very much directed the pace and scale of revolutionary violence and counter-insurgency measures. In many ways, the scope of damage wrought upon built and natural landscapes exceeded human casualties. This paper will help re-conceptualize revolutionary violence in Ireland through digital humanities tools to present a more complex representation of the period.

Bio:

Justin Dolan Stover holds a B.S. in History from Central Michigan University, a M.A. in Twentieth Century Irish History from University College Dublin, and a Ph.D. in History from Trinity College Dublin. His research has explored the social impacts of war and violence in Europe during the First World War and Irish Revolution. Dr Stover’s current work considers the environmental impact of the Irish Revolution, which provides contrasting guerrilla and counter-insurgency examples to larger-scale war damage, displacement, and environmental nationalism in modern Europe.