Rate My Professor David Convery

David Convery is a historian whose research focuses on twentieth-century Irish labour history, working-class writing, and Ireland's engagements with international leftist movements, particularly the Spanish Civil War. He earned his PhD from University College Cork in 2012 with a dissertation entitled 'Brigadistas: The History and Memory of Irish Anti-Fascists in the Spanish Civil War'. As an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at the Irish Centre for the Histories of Labour and Class at NUI Galway, Convery edited 'Locked Out: A Century of Irish Working-Class Life' (Irish Academic Press, 2013), a collection that examines pivotal events and narratives in Irish working-class experiences over a century. His chapter 'Writing and Theorising the Irish Working Class' appears in 'A History of Irish Working-Class Writing' (Cambridge University Press, 2017), offering a comprehensive survey of scholarship and literary representations in the field. Additional contributions include 'Ireland and the Fall of the Second Republic in Spain' in 'Living the Death of Democracy in Spain' (2017) and 'Irish Emigrants in the Spanish Civil War' in 'New Perspectives on the Irish Abroad: The Silent People?' (2014).

Convery has published peer-reviewed articles such as 'Irish participation in medical aid to Republican Spain, 1936-39' (Saothar 35, 2010), 'Cork and the Spanish Civil War' (Journal of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society 114, 2009), and ''As imperialistic as our masters'? Relations between British and Irish communists, 1920-1941' (Contemporary British History 32:4, 2018). He has also written on topics like the memory of British and Irish prisoners of war in San Pedro de Cardeña ('The Spanish Civil War: Exhuming a Buried Past', 2013) and the impact of the Spanish Civil War on figures such as Captain J.R. White ('Saothar 40', 2015). His book reviews feature in prestigious journals including the English Historical Review (2016), History Workshop Journal (2014), and Saothar (multiple issues, 2013-2016), engaging critically with works on Irish socialist republicanism, the British Labour Party's role in Irish independence, and James Connolly's writings. Convery's scholarship illuminates overlooked aspects of Irish history, from emigration and anti-fascist activism to class politics and transnational communism, contributing to labour history discourse through dedicated outlets like Saothar, the journal of the Irish Labour History Society.