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.
Read more about this topic: Paul Bew
Famous quotes containing the words academic and/or career:
“I was so grateful to be independent of the academic establishment. I thought, how awful it would be to have my future hinge on such people and such decisions.”
—Jane Jacobs (b. 1916)
“It is a great many years since at the outset of my career I had to think seriously what life had to offer that was worth having. I came to the conclusion that the chief good for me was freedom to learn, think, and say what I pleased, when I pleased. I have acted on that conviction... and though strongly, and perhaps wisely, warned that I should probably come to grief, I am entirely satisfied with the results of the line of action I have adopted.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)