Dr Suzanne Forbes
Senior Lecturer In History
Biography
I started at The Open University in 2015. Before that I taught at University College Dublin and worked in further education at the National Print Museum’s Culture & Heritage Local Training Initiative.
My research focuses on print culture and political communication in eighteenth-century Ireland. My first monograph, Print and Party Politics in Ireland, 1689–1714, explores these themes in depth. My recent work looks at the representative system and participatory culture, with a focus on controverted election cases.
I also have an interest in digital history and the ways digital methods can be applied to historical research and public engagement. My work has involved text analysis and the development of structured datasets to support quantitative analysis and mapping.
I am co-lead of the project Our Shared Built Military Heritage: The Online Mapping, Inventorying and Recording of the Army Barracks of Ireland, 1690–1921 which was funded by the HEA North South Research Programme. This initiative involved identifying and cataloguing all historic barracks established in Ireland from 1690 to 1921. Further information about the project is available on OpenLearn and the project website barracksireland.wordpress.com.
The project dataset is now available: Suzanne Forbes and Charles Ivar McGrath, Army Barracks of Ireland, 1690-1921: Barracks Dataset and Supplementary Files (version 1.0) (The Open University and University College Dublin, OSBMH Project, 2025), https://doi.org/10.21954/ou.rd.29930801.v1.
I was a co‑founder of the Tudor & Stuart Ireland interdisciplinary conference and podcast series. I am a committee member of the Eigtheenth-Century Ireland Society, and served as editor of the society's journal Eighteenth-Century Ireland from 2019 to 2024.
Teaching interests
My teaching focusses on British and Irish history. I have written units for A111 Discovering the arts and humanities, A225 The British Isles and the modern world, 1789–1914 and the MA History (A883/A884). I am currently module team chair of the MA in History.
I welcome queries from PhD candidates whose work explores aspects of eighteenth-century British or Irish history, or who wish to incorporate digital approaches into their research.
I have been a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy since 2016.
Projects
Our Shared Built Military Heritage: The online mapping, inventorying and recording of the Army Barracks of Ireland, 1690-1921
The commencement of the building of a countrywide network of army barracks in Ireland in the 1690s was a wholly new and innovative approach to dealing with the age-old problem of maintaining a standing army in both peace and wartime. The Irish model set the example for the rest of the British empire as the utility of residential military complexes became apparent. However, the impact of these barracks and their occupants upon Ireland at a local and national level have not been fully investigated. As sites of contested memory, there continues to be significant misunderstanding and misinterpretation of these buildings, both North and South, which in some cases leads to neglect and disharmony. This project will map all army barracks constructed in Ireland from the 1690s through to the end of a British Military presence in the Irish Free State in 1921-2. This work will build on a pilot project that has already identified 279 barracks sites for the period 1690-1822 and involved field work on County Armagh barrack sites, which in turn led to the development of a pilot map application as proof of concept (https://barracks18c.ucd.ie/). Additional data will be gathered on individual barracks, including textual evidence, building plans and images, and a short summary description of each site will be prepared. This will constitute the first complete inventory of all barracks in Ireland built while the whole island was under British governance. This research will facilitate quantitative and qualitative analysis of military barracks sites in Ireland and provide the groundwork for comparisons with Britain and other countries. It will also facilitate the creation of a range of outputs for use by the general public, educators, and researchers, including a web app that can be used for exploring these sites remotely as well as during visits to barrack locations. Co-Lead HEI partner is University College Dublin
