Introduction

Abstract

In January 2011 a workshop in University College Dublin supported by the Wellcome Trust and the UCD Humanities Institute brought together a group of established and emerging scholars of Irish political, social, economic, cultural and medical history to discuss whether it was possible to develop a history of Irish adolescence. We were keen to explore how Irish adolescence fits within the international literature and to decouple it from the history of childhood, which was then beginning to emerge as a field of enquiry among Irish researchers. This volume — one of the outcomes of that conversation — represents the first collection of essays to engage with the question of whether there was such a thing as a distinctively Irish adolescence — or, rather, a variety of adolescences, differing with time, gender, class, religion and geography, reflecting common western patterns, but nonetheless recognisably Irish. These chapters offer some answers to this question and highlight new areas of research in what is a potentially rich and vibrant topic.