HISTORIAN, Dr David Fleming from Tuamgraney has been elected to the Authority of The University of Limerick (UL).
Dr Fleming has been involved in a several projects in Clare, including the work of Friends of the O’Brien Column, Liscannor. He is also a regular host and contributor with Scariff Bay Community Radio. The Cork native is a historian of 18th-century Ireland. On completing his undergraduate studies at UL, he was awarded, in 2006, a DPhil from the University of Oxford, where he had been a senior scholar at Hertford College and an Arts and Humanities Research Council postgraduate awardee.
His research concentrates on the social and political development of 18th-century Ireland, and has published on topics ranging from provincial politics, poverty, religious conversion, associational behaviour and prostitution. Dr Fleming was commissioned, in 2012, to write the official history of UL.
Prior to taking up his position at UL, Dr Fleming taught at the University of Oxford and NUI Maynooth. He teaches courses on ‘Early Modern Ireland’ and ‘Europe: enlightenment and revolution’.
He also delivers two specialist modules to advanced history students: ‘Conservatives, patriots and radicals: politics and political ideology in eighteenth-century Britain and Ireland’ and ‘Sex, family and gender in eighteenth-century Ireland and Britain’.
In 2006, he was a Price Fellow at the William L Clements Library, University of Michigan, where he catalogued the extensive papers of General Sir Eyre Coote (1762-1823).
A year later he was an Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences Postdoctoral Fellow. In 2015-16, Dr Fleming was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Montana, where he delivered modules in Irish history as part of that University’s Irish Studies programme.
Dr Fleming is treasurer of the Group for the Study of Irish Historic Settlement, an interdisciplinary forum for historians, geographers, archaeologists and others interested in settlement history in Ireland.
He is also secretary of the Eighteenth-Century Ireland Society. Since 2013, he has been chairperson of the Irish Georgian Foundation and a trustee of the Hunt Museums’ Trust.