Academic Career
Bew attended Campbell College, Belfast as a youth, before studying for his BA and PhD at Pembroke College, Cambridge. His first book, Land and the National Question in Ireland, 1858-82 was a revisionist study that challenged nationalist historiography by examining not only the clash between landowners and tenants, but the conflict between large and small tenants as well. His third book, a short study of Charles Stewart Parnell, challenged some of the arguments of the award-winning biography of Parnell by F. S. L. Lyons, though Lyons, one of the "doyens" of modern Irish history, acknowledged the young historian's arguments by stating that "Nothing Dr Bew writes is without interest."
In 2007, Oxford University Press published Bew's Ireland: The Politics of Enmity 1789-2006, which forms part of the Oxford History of Modern Europe series. The book has received positive reviews.
Bew also acted as a historical advisor to the Bloody Sunday Inquiry between 1998 and 2001.
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