Gavin Foster
is a doctoral candidate in Modern European History who has taught, presented conference papers, and published on various aspects of modern Irish and British history. His dissertation project – 'The Social Structures and Cultural Politics of the Irish Civil War’, supervised by Professor Jim Smyth – examines the overlooked social dimensions of the violence that accompanied the establishment of the Irish Free State in the early 1920s. As a Kaneb Institute Pre – Dissertation Fellow for the academic year 2008 – 09, Gavin will be based at the University of Illinois at Chicago where he will work with British historian James Sack and serve as a visiting instructor. Other areas of scholarly interest include Irish America, modern France, comparative nationalism, labor history, republicanism, and migration studies.