Tom Garvin

Who is Tom Garvin?

Tom Christopher Garvin is an Irish political scientist and historian. He is Professor Emeritus of Politics in University College Dublin. He retired from lecturing duties in August 2008. He is an alumnus of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC.

Garvin is a graduate of UCD with a BA in History and Politics and an MA in Politics. His PhD was awarded by the University of Georgia in 1974 for his thesis “Political parties in a Dublin constituency: a behavioural analysis”. He was a central figure in establishing the Political Studies Association of Ireland in 1982, and his professional reputation saw him win rapid promotion in UCD, where he became Professor of Politics in 1991. In that capacity, he also served as Head of Department until 2005. His academic career was marked by productive sabbaticals in the USA. His academic distinction was marked by his election as a member of the Royal Irish Academy in 2003.

Garvin’s academic output includes 60 articles in journals, chapters in books, and publications of similar type; six books, with a further two forthcoming; two edited volumes; and a range of publications of other kinds. The best-known of his books form a sequence dealing with successive themes in the emergence of modern Ireland: "The evolution of Irish nationalist politics"; "Nationalist revolutionaries in Ireland 1858-1928"; "1922: the birth of Irish democracy"; and "Preventing the future: why was Ireland so poor for so long".