Alison Forrestal

I completeda BA Hons at St. Patricks College, Maynooth, and Maynooth University, in the mid-1990s, and, having fallen in love with History, went on to complete an MA in History at Maynooth University and a PhD in History at the University of Manchester, under the direction of Professor Joseph Bergin, FBA. I secured my first lecturing post at the University of Warwick, before spending six enjoyableyears as a lecturer at Durham University. I was appointed lecturer at NUI Galway in 2006, and raised to a senior lectureship in 2017. In 2020, I was promoted to a professorship.  Since 2023, I have been Head of the School of History and Philosophy at the University of Galway.

My primary research expertise lies with the Discipline of History's Religion and Society Research Area, but also with the Research Areas of Justice and Activism and Ireland in Global Context. I am a specialist in the early modern history of religion, with particular interest in the social, political and cultural history of the Catholic Reformation in Franceand Ireland. I have completed major projects on seventeenth-century religious reform and activism, clerical culture and mission, which have resulted in three monographs and many articles and essays. Most recently, I published my third monograph with Oxford University Press: Vincent de Paul, the Lazarist Mission, and French CatholicReform (2017). In this, I examined the developmentof the reform enterprises associated with Vincent de Paul (1581-1660), a driving force behind the Catholic Reformation in France and internationally,whose influence on Catholic socio-cultural norms and ideals has endured to the present. This project also included an innovative digital element, in which I acted as co-PI for the development of an open access collection of transcriptions and translations of 900 primary documents from the Vatican Archives (Vincentian Missionaries in Seventeenth-Century Europe and Africa: A Digital Edition of Sources http:earlymoderndocs.omeka.nethttp:earlymoderndocs.omeka.net -).

Through my career, my research has benefited from many individual and team research awards, including awards from the British Academy, the Irish Research Council, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, DePaul Office of Mission and Values, and PRTLI4. I have also won a Dean's Award for Research and a Presidents Award for Research Excellence, and have twice been selected to represent NUIG in the national finals of the Irish Research Councils Researcher of the Year Award. In 2019, I became an elected Member of the Royal Irish Academy (MRIA), the highest academic honour in Ireland. Since January2022, I have been Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Religion at NUIG: https:mooreinstitute.ieresearch-centrecsr (BlueSky: @csrgalway.bsky.social).

Looking to the future, I am developing projects on the perpetuation of inter-generational religious values and identities amongst clerical congregations and devout families of the French Catholic Reformation and its legacy. My main project focuses on thefoundation, consolidation and survival of two new clerical missionary congregations founded in the seventeenth century: the Congregation of the Mission and the Society of Foreign Missions. For this, I am currently researching the bureaucracy of mission as it concerned the processes of knowledge-building and spiritual governance in and beyond France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I am simultaneously examining the afterlife of Vincent de Paul and the generation of models of holiness in the archives of necrology compiled by the Congregation of the Mission.

My research interests lie in the history of early modern Catholic culture and society, with particular interests in Catholic Reformation in France and Ireland. My most recent project focused on the career of Vincent de Paul and the development of the Congregation of the Mission (Lazarists) within the Catholic reform movement of seventeenth-century France, andI amnow in the early stages of a new project on inter-generational religious identities among devout activists of the Catholic Reformation. I would welcome enquiries from those interested in postgraduate research on early modern France and/or Ireland, and more generally on the history of Christianity in the early modern world.