Misc Magazine: An Interview with Professor Earner-Byrne

Professor Lindsey Earner-Byrne almost cancelled this interview.

We were coming to the end of the interview when Lindsey admitted that she had almost cancelled on me that morning. It was the day after the US election — for many women it was a day that felt heavy with the grief of what could have been and the dread of what was to come. The leader of the free world would be, once again, someone who engineered a limiting of female reproductive freedoms, has openly joked about assaulting women and was found liable in court for sexually abusing a woman. With the weight of that knowledge and feeling I was not surprised to discover that Earner-Byrne had found coming to an interview about her life’s work – to make clear how the decisions and ideals of those in power affects the everyday lives of societies most vulnerable people, particularly women and children – tricky to do that morning. 

However, as with many other occasions over the course of her academic career, Professor Earner-Byrne persisted.

Until very recently, Professor Earner-Byrne struggled to get her academic work published in Ireland. No questions were ever raised about the quality of her work,  rather she was told by Irish historical journals that her work was “too niche a topic for them”. The irony of such feedback is that she is a historian of modern Irish history –where should someone publish work on modern Irish history but an Irish historical journal?

Artwork by Eve Smith

Perhaps it was the discomfort that her work generated that caused her fellow historians to dismiss and reject her academic papers. Professor Earner-Byrne has, for example, written about gender-based violence during and after the Irish war of Independence, and worked to expose how much responsibility the Irish Free State bears for imprisoning thousands of women and children in Magdalene Laundries, Industrial Schools and Mother and Baby Homes. Her work highlights the life stories of vulnerable people whom the state sought to suppress, exclude and lock away. In this way she holds up an uncomfortable mirror to our perceptions of Ireland’s recent past.“It’s difficult to constantly challenge something” Professor Earner-Byrne admits.

Over the course of her career, Professor Earner-Byrne has fought for women and other vulnerable groups to be included on an equal footing in the narratives we tell about contemporary Irish history. She undertook a PhD on the Donnybrook Magdalene Laundry at University College Dublin and went on to be a lecturer of Modern Irish History there. In January 2021 she became the Republic of Ireland’s first ever professor of Irish Gender History at University College Cork before moving to Trinity in 2023 to take up a position as a professor of Contemporary Irish History.

Professor Earner-Byrne sometimes worries that she is teaching in an echo chamber. “I am a bit stopped at the moment thinking: What can I do To reach a different audience?” Men used to make up around ten per cent of her students, but over the past decade she has watched that number dwindle. The books she has published and the talks and papers Professor Earner-Byrne gives, many of which are not explicitly about gender, tend to be received by a mainly female audience as well: “The audiences are still very hermetically sealed, we are still kind of talking to ourselves”.

Turning to Trinity more specifically, Professor Earner-Byrne reminded me that the way the current undergraduate History degree is structured means that students have very few options to study gender history. “I am a little bit concerned that you could have people bypass entirely the issue of gender”, she says.

The concern about students of History potentially never being exposed to gender history ties in more widely with part of Professor Earner-Byrne’s reasoning for wanting to become a historian. She believes that understanding the history of power is a way for us to gain a better understanding of the inequalities that are still inherent to Irish society today.

However, the primary reason Professor Earner-Byrne became an academic was to quite radically change the field of History. She explained, “I didn’t want to have a book that looked the same, except chapter nine was about women”. Instead of awkwardly inserting women into exclusively male historical narratives, Professor Earner-Byrne has sought to change the very questions that academics ask about history.

At this point, I stopped to ask Professor Earner-Byrne where she thought we were today. She paused. “We’re lucky if we still get it, but we got our chapter”. She then pointed to the books about Irish history that regularly appear on university reading lists, some coming in at over over a thousand pages, that mention a woman only once or twice. 

Nevertheless, Professor Earner-Byrne does see some cause for hope. “I now do not include all the readings that I could on reading lists for my modules as I do not want to overwhelm people. But when I started, I used to struggle to get three pages of recommended readings [for my gender history modules]”. 

As time goes on, Professor Earner-Byrne observes that those coming to teach and write about history are becoming more diverse, which is something that she celebrates. “I’m going to ask certain questions of the sources that somebody from a different background may not ask”. She concedes that there is still a long way to go, but sees the vibrancy of  gender history at a moment as a cause for celebration. 

“It’s a tough day” Professor Earner-Byrne told me as our interview drew to a close, “But there are reasons to be hopeful”.