Andrew Sneddon

Dr Andrew Sneddon (BA hons, Hertfordshire; M.Litt, St Andrews; PhD Lancaster) is a social and cultural historian, with a special interest in Britain and Ireland, viewed in an international context.

Dr Sneddon served for six years as president of the Ulster Society for Irish Historical Studies and is a member of the AHRC's Peer Review College and a fellow of the Higher Education Academy. He has served as Business Editor of the Irish Economic and Social History Society and is currently joint editor of leading journal, Irish Historical Studies. He regularly reviews and peer reviews for leading academic journals and publishers.

His latest research explores Irish witchcraft, magic and the supernatural in a comparative framework from the medieval to the modern period. His third book, Witchcraft and Magic in Ireland was published by Palgrave, while, Representing Magic in Modern Ireland: Belief, History and Culture was published in paperback in 2022 by Cambridge University Press. His latest articles on witchcraft and magic appear in leading edited collections and peer reviewed journals, including Preternature, Irish Historical Studies, Historical Journal and Cultural and Social History. He is currently writing a monograph for Cambridge University Press (Disability and Magic in early Modern Britain and America), and editing a collection for Bloomsbury on the cultural history of magic in enlightenment Europe.

Dr Sneddon currently leads, with Dr Victoria McCollum (Cinematic Arts), the 'Islandmagee Witches 1711' project. This collaborative, multidisciplinary, public history project uses creative writing and new technologies to explore Ireland’s last witch trial held in County Antrim in 1711. Project outputs include: digitised trial records, a graphic novel, a ‘serious’ video game, an original musical score, and a Virtual Reality Experience, and Exhibition. Project website: w1711.org.

He also has extensive experience of working with the British and Irish media to produce television and radio programmes (including RTE, TG4, BBC) based on his research. He has received research grants from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the Wellcome Trust, Connected NI, the Lottery Heritage Fund, and Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure.

He regularly organises and presents papers at academic conferences along with invited lectures and keynotes. He also undertakes civic engagement and outreach work and regularly gives talks and hosts workshops for community and educational groups.

He has previously taught at the University of Glasgow and Queen's Univeristy Belfast. Dr Sneddon's post-doctoral work was completed on the Levelhulme-funded, Irish Legislation Project, directed by Professor David Hayton and Professor James Kelly. He was then Research Fellow in the Institute of Irish Studies at Queen's working on eighteenth-century medical history. He was appointed lecturer in International History at Ulster University in 2009. 

His undergraduate teaching at Ulster focuses on politics, religion, culture, medicine and magic in Europe and Colonial America in the early modern and modern periods. He has supervised a range of master’s and PhD dissertations.

Current Teaching

HIS140, ‘Disenchanted Land: Culture and Society in Early Modern Europe.’ 

HIS337, ‘Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain and Ireland.’ 

HIS337, ‘History in Practice: Preparing and Planning a History Research Project.’

HIS 560, ‘Witchcraft and Magic in early modern Europe and Colonial New England.’

HIS130, ‘Making History: Skills for Historians.’

HIS 517, Undergraduate History Research Project, supervisor.

MA in History, HIS703, ‘Historian’s Craft: Writing History.’

Current PHD Supervision 

- 'Voices of Ulster's Poor: Charitable Requests, 1850s-1920s.'

- 'A re-evaluation of the 'Irish Brigades' and the folklore surrounding the 'Wild Geese' before and after the Irish diaspora during the Jacobite period'.

-  'Managing Madness: Asylums in Ulster 1845-1914'.

- 'Longitudual study of mental health in young men in the Northwest Ireland 1829-1919'.

Completed PhD Supervision

- Lauren Bell, 'The Great Scottish Migration to Ulster in the 1690s'

-Nigel Farrell, 'Asiatic cholera and the development of public health in Belfast 1832-1878' https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?did=1&uin=uk.bl.ethos.669695

-Jodie Shevlin, 'The Supernatural in Catholic Ireland in the Long Nineteenth-Century' https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?did=1&uin=uk.bl.ethos.821049

-John Fulton, 'Clerics, Conjurors and courtrooms : witchcraft, magic and religion in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ireland'. https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.706467