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Staff Profiles

Dr Andrew Phemister

Research Associate (History)

Background

I am a political, intellectual and environmental historian of Ireland, Britain and the United States in their transnational contexts, focusing primarily on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

My work examines agrarian and labour politics, popular activism, and political thought, particularly the trajectories of liberalism, radicalism and socialism across the North Atlantic world.

I hold degrees from the Universities of Edinburgh and Cambridge, and I have previously worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Galway, the University of Oxford, and Edinburgh's Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities.

My first book, Land and Liberalism: Henry George and the Irish Land War (Cambridge, 2023), looks at how agrarian radicalism shaped late Victorian liberal politics, and I also work on the history of the practice of boycotting. I am currently a Research Associate working on the Connected Treescapes project at Newcastle.

Research
  • Agrarian politics and political thought, particularly with regard to late-nineteenth and early twentieth century liberalism
  • Transnationalism and the labour movement, and Irish inflections of radical and socialist politics in the United States and Britain.
  • Boycotting and popular protest, especially how conceptions of non-violent political activism have existed in productive tension with normative liberal freedoms.
  • Methodological connections between social history and intellectual history, including contributing to the development of the social history of ideas
  • Materialism, the politics of the body and conceptions of individual and social ‘rights’, in particular agrarian epistemologies and how these pertain to ecological and environmental assumptions and structures in political thought.
Publications