José Brownrigg-Gleeson

I am a historian of Latin America and Ireland in the 18th-20th centuries. I hold a PhD in History from the University of Salamanca, where I am also member of Indusal, the university’s research group on Latin American independence. Together with exploring the intellectual and political dimensions of Irish involvement in the revolutionary processes of the Hispanic world, I have published on other aspects of transnational history, such as Irish migration, mobility and multilingualism in Spanish America during the late colonial period, and Hispano-Irish relations. This research has received the generous support of various institutions, including the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, the Irish Research Council, and Harvard University’s International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World.

Between 2022 and 2024, I was an Investigador Distinguido "María Zambrano" at the University of Salamanca. Before that I worked as an Irish Research Council-Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Galway (2019-22). I was also the 2017–18 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellow at the University of Notre Dame’s Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies (USA), and previously worked as an associate lecturer at the University of Winchester (UK), and as a research assistant at the National University of Ireland Galway on the project ‘Changing Words/Changing Worlds: Translation in Nineteenth-Century Ireland’, directed by Dr. Anne O’Connor and funded by the IRC. I am also active in the field of translation and have translated several books.

I am currently working on a monograph which examines the neglected role of Latin America in the development of Irish perceptions of imperialism, decolonization and modernity during the Age of Revolutions (1776–1848). The project looks beyond the scholarship concerning the place of Ireland within the British Empire to analyse the rich body of textual images of Latin America created and circulated amongst Irish communities —both at home and abroad— during the period. The research first charts Irish images of the Iberian New World in the late 18th century. It then traces Irish interpretations of the challenges faced by Latin America during the struggle for independence and the formation of the new nation-states, in the form of civil wars, economic crises and racial tensions. Finally, it studies how these views were assimilated and integrated into discussions about the Irish experience of empire and emigration from the passing of the Act of Union to Young Ireland’s abortive 1848 rebellion. Additionally, the project aspires to encourage discussion on the position of Latin America in the expanding environment of Irish Studies.

My most recent publications are  'Fighting an Empire for the Good of the Empire? Transnational Ireland and the Struggle for Independence in Spanish America', Radical History Review vol. 143 (May 2022), pp. 32–49; and "“Soldiers, Settlers, Slavers: Irish Lives on the Spanish Borderlands of North America and the Caribbean in the Revolutionary 1790s”, in Finola O’Kane and Ciaran O’NEILL (eds.), Ireland, Slavery and the Caribbean: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2023), pp. 125–141.