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Enda Delaney (Edinburgh): The Cognitive Revolution in Modern Ireland, 1850-1920

This talk draws on Enda Delaney's recent book, Making Ireland Modern: The Transformation of  Society and Culture (Oxford University Press, 2025), to explore the cognition revolution in modern Ireland. Post-Famine Ireland experienced rapid economic, social, political and cultural change, but what about cognitive change? Cognition is the process by which humans acquire knowledge, information and understanding, and is fundamentally about sense-making—all the ways in which we obtain, collate and process information from the environment.

There’s been much talk about Ireland’s revolutionary moments, from the devotional revolution of post-Famine Ireland to the political revolution of the early 20th century, and even the liberal revolution that has brought about dramatic social and cultural change since the 2000s. Historians quite appropriately focus on such inflections that mark a discontinuity or rupture often characterised with words such as watersheds or turning points. Across Anglophone historiography commemoration of often very different revolutions is a staple topic.

But what about a cognitive revolution that does not have a starting or indeed an end point, or is so quiet a revolution that most historians have not even noticed it? Using examples such as the Irish language shift, changes in patterns of popular consumption, the decline of oral culture and the loss of vernacular modes of thought, this paper asks is it now time to add the ‘cognitive revolution’ to the list of revolutions that shaped modern Ireland?                                                                                                                                       

Enda Delaney is Professor of Modern History at Edinburgh University and Director of Research at the Edinburgh Futures Institute.

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