Patrick Griffin

Patrick Griffin is the Madden-Hennebry Family Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame and a Bye-Fellow of St Edmund’s College, University of Cambridge. He served as the Thomas Moore and Judith Livingston Director of the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies from 2018 through 2024.

Professor Griffin joined the Notre Dame faculty in 2008, coming from the University of Virginia. He explores the intersection of colonial American and early modern Irish and British history, focusing on Atlantic-wide themes and dynamics. He also examines the ways in which Ireland, Britain and America were linked during the 17th and 18th centuries. He has studied revolution and rebellion, movement and migration, and colonization and violence in each society.

Professor Griffin earned his bachelor’s degree in government and history from Notre Dame. He went on to earn a master’s degree in political science from Columbia University and his Ph.D. in American history from Northwestern University.

He is the author or editor of several books, including: The Age of Atlantic Revolution: The  Fall and Rise of a Connected World (Yale University Press, 2023); The Townshend Moment: The Making of Empire and Revolution in the Eighteenth Century (Yale University Press, 2017); America’s Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2012); American Leviathan: Empire, Nation, and Revolutionary Frontier (Hill & Wang, 2007); and The People with No Name: Ireland’s Ulster Scots, America’s Scots Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World (Princeton University Press, 2001). His newest book, Prizefighter: Yankee Sullivan and the Hands That Built the Modern World (University of Virginia Press) is set to come out in 2026.

Professor Griffin has received several awards, including grants and fellowships from the American Council for Learned Societies, the Huntington Library, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Filson Historical Society. In 2018, The University of Edinburgh conferred on him the distinction of “Honorary Professor.” In 2021-2022, he was the Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at the University of Oxford. In 2023, he was named an Honorary Member of Royal Irish Academy. 

Professor Griffin chaired Notre Dame’s Department of History from 2011-2017 and was honored in 2017 with the James A. Burns C.S.C. Graduate School Award for his numerous contributions to graduate studies. Particularly cited in that award was the founding and organization of the Global Dome PhD Program with the University of Edinburgh’s Professor of History Frank Cogliano. Since its inaugural year in 2012, the Global Dome Program has been a highly successful, intensive seminar designed to accelerate dissertation progress and build international networks of young scholars in the humanities field.

Research interests:
Empires & Colonialism
Intellectual and Political History
Race & Ethnicity