Ian McBride joined Hertford in 2016 as the Foster Professor of Irish History. The Foster chair is the only endowed chair of Irish History in Britain, and is attached to Hertford, the Oxford college with the strongest Irish associations. He has broad interests in Ireland between the seventeenth and twenty-first centuries, especially its politics, culture and intellectual life. He currently holds a Leverhulme Major Research Award which will enable him to spend two years researching and writing a study of the impact of the penal laws on eighteenth-century Ireland.
