Sean Farrell (Northern Illinois University): ‘Sanitary Reform and the Politics of Public Health in Victorian Belfast’

 Sean Farrell is Professor of History at Northern Illinois University, researching religion and popular politics in modern Ireland. He is author of Rituals and Riots: Sectarian Violence and Political Culture in Ulster, 1784-1886 (2000), and co-author with Mathieu Billings of The Irish in Illinois (2021). His latest book, Thomas Drew and the Making of Victorian Belfast (2023), uses the public career of a populist Orange cleric to re-evaluate aspects of the history of 19th-century Belfast. He is currently working on a synthetic essay on the challenge of sectarianism in 19th-century Ireland, and a research monograph on the ‘Blackstaff Nuisance’, a study of an environmental disaster in Victorian Belfast. He is a former President of the American Conference for Irish Studies and is a QUB AHSS Visiting Global Scholar for 2025.

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