Humanities and Social Sciences

History Program

Staff Profiles

Dr Phillip Bull

Associate Professor & Director, Innovative Universities European Union Centre Room: Humanities 3 Building, Rm 235 Tel: (61 3) 9479 3326 & (61 3) 9479 2440 Fax: (61 3) 9479 5182 Email: p.j.bull@latrobe.edu.au Qualifications: BA Adel., PhD Camb.

Philip Bull joined the then Department of History at La Trobe University in January 1976, having previously held a position in the Department of Western Manuscripts at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, where he was responsible for collections of nineteenth and twentieth century British political papers. He took his first degree at the University of Adelaide and his doctorate at the University of Cambridge. His principal research interest is in the political history of Ireland in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly in the period from the 1860s to the 1920s. Within that field his work has focused especially on the relationship of the land tenure issue to the development of nationalism and more generally on how this affected the relationship between Ireland and Britain. His teaching has been in Irish and British history, but also more generally in modern European history. Since 2006 he has been the Director of the Innovative Universities European Union Centre, a project jointly funded by the European Union, La Trobe University and Macquarie University, but involving as partners five other universities around Australia – Flinders, Griffith, James Cook, Murdoch and Newcastle. He is also Co-editor of the Australasian Journal of Irish Studies. Phillip's research interests include: Irish and British political and social history, 18th to 20th centuries.

Research Projects

• A political history of Ireland from 1865 to 1925 with a focus on the politics of accommodation as distinct from a more usual preoccupation with conflict and crisis.
• A biography of William O’Brien, Irish nationalist politician and land agitator, 1852–1928.

Research Publications

• Philip Bull has published extensively on Irish political history in learned journals and collected volumes of papers. His more significant publications include:
  (ed. with Frances Devlin-Glass and Helen Doyle), Ireland and Australia, 1798–1998: Studies in Culture, Identity and Migration, Sydney, Crossing Press, 2000.
  
• Land, Politics and Nationalism: A study of the Irish Land Question, Dublin, Gill & Macmillan, 1996.
  ‘Sacrifice, Liberalism and the Great War: The case of Ireland’, War and Society, xxiii (September 2005), pp. 13–21.
  
• ‘The Formation of the United Irish League, 1898-1900: The dynamics of Irish agrarian agitation’, Irish Historical Studies, no. 132, November 2003.
  ‘Isaac Butt and the politics of accommodation’, Australian Journal of Irish Studies, i (2001), pp. 158-66.
  
• ‘The significance of the nationalist response to the Irish land act of 1903’, Irish Historical Studies, xxviii, no. 111 (May 1993), pp. 283-305.

Graduate Supervision Areas and Topics

Philip Bull is available for supervision in the area of Irish and British history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and in contemporary political issues relating to Ireland or Britain.