Life
1958; b. 7 March, Co. Wexford; ed. UCD, grad. 1978 (1st in English & Geography); PhD, “A Geography of Society and Culture in Ireland Since 1800”, 1981); held UI travelling schol. at Memorial Univ., Newfoundland; asst. keeper, NLI, 1983-89; Newman Scholar, UCD, 1989-92; 1798 Bicentennial Research Fellow at RIA, 1992-95; Adj. Professor (Arts), UCG, 1994; Visiting Professor, Ireland House, NYU, Spring 1995; Burns Library Visiting Scholarship at Boston College, 1995-96; issued The Tree of Liberty: Radicalism, Catholicism and the Construction of Irish Identity 1760-1830 (1996); also, with F. H. Aalan, ed., The Atlas of the Irish Rural Landscape (1997); Visiting Professor, Notre Dame Univ., Spring 1997; Visiting Professor, Concordia Univ. (Montreal), Summer 1997 & 2004; issued Fellowship of Freedom: The United Irishmen and the 1798 Rebellion (1998); appt. Michael
Smurfit Director of the University of Keough-Notre Dame Centre in Dublin,
1998; acts as historical advisor to the Irish government on the Famine and the 1798 Rebellion, and chairs the Irish-Argentinian Research Fund’s Selection Committee, 2004-05; forthcoming, The Killing Snows: Cultural Change in Nineteenth-Century Ireland [2005].
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Works
(Selected) ‘Catholic Mobilisation 1750-1855, in P. Bergeron and Louis
Cullen, eds., Culture et Pratiques Politiques en France et en Irlande
XVIe-XVIIIe Siecle, Actes Du colloque de Marseille 28 Sept-2 Oct 1988;
‘The Regional Impact of Irish Catholicism 1700-1900, in W. Smyth
and L. K. Whelan, eds., Common Ground: Essays on the Historical Geography
of Ireland presented to T Jones Hughes (Cork 1988); ‘The Role
of the Catholic Priest in the 1798 Rebellion in Wexford’, in Whelan
& William Nolan, eds., Wexford History and Society (Dublin 1987)
[out of 85 priests a max. of 11, of which 7 had drink problems, involved
with United Irishmen]; ed., with W. J. Smyth, Common Ground: Essays
on the Historical Geography of Ireland, (Cork UP 1988); ‘Catholic
Mobilisation 1750-1850’, in P. Bergeron and L. M. Cullen, eds., Comparative
Aspects of Politicisation in Ireland and France (Paris: Seuil 1990);
‘The Recent Writing of Irish History’, in UCD History Review
(1991), pp.27-35; ‘The Power of Place’, Irish Review,
12 (1992), pp.13-20; with David Dickson and Dáire Keogh, eds.,
The United Irishmen: Republicanism, Radicalism, and Rebellion (Dublin:
Lilliput 1993); ‘The Bases of Regionalism’, in P. Ó Drisceoil,
ed., Culture in Ireland: Regions, Identity and Power (Belfast:
IIS 1993), pp.5-63; keynote essay in Daire Keogh and Nicholas Furlong,
eds., The Mighty Wave: The 1798 Rebellion in Wexford (Dublin: Four
Courts 1996); The Tree of Liberty: Radicalism, Catholicism, and the
Construction of Irish Identity, 1760-1830 [Field Day] (Cork UP 1996),
236pp.; contrib. to J. S. Donnelly and Kerby A. Miller, eds., Irish
Popular Culture 1650-1850 (Dublin: IAP 1998).
Also, ‘Reading the Ruins: The Presence of Absence in the Irish Landscape’, in Howard B. Clarke, et al. eds., Surveying Ireland’s Past: Multidisciplinary Essays in Honour of Anngret Simms (Dublin: Geography Publications 2004)
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Criticism
Teresa Doran and family, ‘The Inbetween-agers’, review of A Wonderful
Boy: A Story of the Holocaust, in Books Ireland (March 2000),
p.71.
R. F. Foster, ‘Remembering 1798’, in The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making It Up in Ireland (Penguin 2001), pp. 180-81.)
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Notes
Whelan offers view that United Irishmen sought to ‘supplant a political system rooted in sectarian privilege’ with ‘a secular democratic politics, founded on universal ideas of equality and justice’ and that this was ‘deliberately blocked by the British state, using the weapons of sectarianism, military terror … and the suppression of the Irish parliament.’ See also under Richard Musgrave, supra.
Kevin Whelan, who works with autistic children, contrib. to Jacqueline Hill and Colm Lennon, eds., Luxury and Austerity (Dublin: UCD Press 1999); also A Wonderful Boy: A Story of the Holocaust (Dublin: Marino 1999), 108pp. [novel]
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)