ARA Ireland Diversity & Inclusion webinar: Teaching and Learning LGBT+ Irish History: Accessing the Past and Present’

Teaching and Learning LGBT+ Irish History: Accessing the Past and Present,

Dr Diarmuid Scully, School of History, UCC.

Until 1993, homosexuality was criminalised in Ireland. For centuries, Church, State, and public opinion shamed, silenced, and persecuted LGBT+ people for ‘the love that dare not speak its name.’ Despite transformational developments including marriage equality, we are still living with the legacies of that oppression. Looking at the historical record and how we can access it and share knowledge and understanding, this presentation will explore legacies of oppression and how they may be challenged and overcome.

Dr Diarmuid Scully is a Lecturer in the School of History, University College Cork. His interests are medieval cultural history and modern and contemporary LGBT+ history. Far apart in time, these two interests are connected by the theme of identities: how we construct personal, national, and sexual identities and how the ‘other’ is imagined in text and image. When Dr Diarmuid Scully began teaching LGBT+ history in 2018, his undergraduate module HI 2105 LGBT Identities in Modern Ireland became the first dedicated course on Irish LGBT+ history to be taught in any university on the island of Ireland.