Sean is Professor of Modern Irish and British social history. He is a founder of QUOTE Hub (Queen’s University collective of oral historians) and editor of Oral History. Past work has included examinations of the history of history of working-class experiences of consumer credit and debt, resulting in three books for Oxford University Press, Mail Order Retailing in Britain: a Business and Social History (2005), Credit and Community: Working Class Debt since 1880 (2009 ) and The Politics of Consumer Credit in the UK, 1938-1992 (2018). He is currently completing a monograph for Palgrave Pivot on the history of joyriding, which includes an examination of arguments about deindustrialisation and young offenders. Most recently, Sean completed a research report, commissioned by the Department of Health (Northern Ireland), examining the history of mother and baby homes and Magdalene laundries in Northern Ireland (with co-investigator Leanne McCormick of UU). Once that is published (scheduled January 2021), Sean looks forward to returning to the exploration of deindustrialisation in Northern Ireland that was first explored in his article ‘The troubles with a lower case ‘t’ (Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 2018).
Email: s.oconnell@qub.ac.uk
