Hélène O'Keeffe

Hélène O’Keeffe is a historian of modern Irish history and a Research Support Officer in the College of Arts, Celtic Studies and Social Sciences at University College Cork. She was a researcher on the Atlas of the Irish Revolution (2017), a multi-award-winning publication and exemplar of collaborative interdisciplinary research in the humanities. During the Decade of Centenaries (2012-23) she coordinated a range of map-based public outreach and engagement projects supported with funding from the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts Gaeltacht, Sport and Media. These included educational resources for schools, a series of public history projects in partnership with RTÉ Digital, a public lecture series in collaboration with the National Library of Ireland. She also curated the ‘Mapping the Irish Revolution’ public exhibition in 2019, and co-organised the four-day Irish Civil War National Conference at UCC in 2020. In 2023-24, Hélène was project manager of the Irish Civil War Fatalities Project, which enumerated for the first time all of the Civil War’s combatant and civilian fatalities. She was also co-editor of the award-winning Atlas of the Irish Civil War: New Perspectives (2024), and co-recipient of the UCC Research Team of the Year Award in 2018 and 2024. 

Research interests encompass Irish Revolutionary history, oral history and memory studies, with a particular focus on the cultural and social dimensions of historical commemoration. She also maintains an interest in intangible cultural heritage and was Head of Education and Communications at the Heritage Council before beginning her Postdoctoral research as part of the interdisciplinary Atlas of the Irish Revolution Team in UCC in 2016.