Rory Rapple

Biography

Rory Rapple is Associate Professor of History with research interests that include political thinking in Early Modern Britain and Ireland; Britain, Ireland and the Atlantic World; violence in Early-Modern Europe; military culture in Early Modern Europe; and aspects of political and social culture in Ireland during the twentieth century.

He is currently writing a book on the life and mental world of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, the pioneer of English transatlantic exploration and settlement who played a significant role in Irish history. The book will place particular emphasis on his considerable reputation among contemporaries as the champion of a particularly high view of monarchical power. 

He is also researching and writing on the methods used in the administration of the Crown Army in Tudor and Early Stuart Ireland from the eve of the Nine Years’ War to the unfolding of Strafford’s plans for a new army. This is part of a wider survey of the character of the Tudor and Stuart administration in Ireland. A third book project is the dynamic of the conflict often called the "Nine Years' War" which convulsed both English and Irish politics in the last decade of Elizabeth I's reign.

Professor Rapple's publications include: Martial Power and Elizabethan Political Culture: military men in England and Ireland, 1558-1594 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); ‘Brinkmanship and bad luck: Ireland, the Nine Years’ War and the Succession’ in Doubtful and Dangerous:The Question of succession in late Elizabethan England, eds S. Doran and P. Kewes (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), 236-256; and Shakespeare, the Irish, and Military Culture’ an 8,500 word chapter in The Age of Shakespeare, ed. R. Malcolm Smuts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

Office: 219 O’Shaughnessy Hall
Email: roryrapple220@gmail.com