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History Hub presents – A history of xenophobia: from the goldmines to the rise of the far right today – a series of interviews between our editor, Dr Irial Glynn, and a number of world-leading experts on the history of xenophobia.
Does it stem from anger related to a real or perceived decline in living standards? Does it reflect discomfort with the pace of social change or increasing societal diversity? Or is it connected to the arrival of charismatic and innovative politicians and well-organised far right parties?
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You can explore the episodes and learn more about the interviewees below or subscribe to the series on podcasting apps such as Apple, Spotify and Soundcloud.
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Listen to the series by subscribing on Apple, Spotify and Soundcloud. Subscribing is totally free of charge. Explore the individual episodes, and learn more about the interviewees in the series, below.
About Joe Mulhall
Joe Mulhall is the Director of research at HOPE not hate, the UK’s largest anti-fascism organisation and an expert on far-right extremism. He has a PhD on the history of fascism and his books include: Drums in the Distance: Journeys in the Global Far Right; British Fascism After the Holocaust; and, The International Alternative Right (Co-Author).
For a decade, often undercover at significant personal risk, Joe Mulahll investigated hate groups. He infiltrated a US white supremacist militia, set up a fake Ku Klux Klan branch, has been on countless street marches with violent far-right groups across Europe, and got inside some of the most important ‘alt-right’ meetings ever held. Mulhall’s dramatic experiences on the front line of anti-fascist activism, coupled with his academic research, clearly explain the roots of both elected and non-elected far-right movements across the globe.
He writes regularly for the print media including for the Guardian, Independent and New Statesman and appears regularly on broadcast media including the BBC News at Ten, Radio 4’s Today programme, The Moral Maze and Channel 4 News, among others.
About Matt Golder
Matt Golder is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Pennsylvania State University. His research focuses on political representation. In addition to articles in a variety of journals, he has also published three books, Interaction Models: Specification and Interpretation, Principles of Comparative Politics, and Foundations in Comparative Politics. Together with Sona Golder, he runs the CP Group, a lab-based research group that comprises post-doctoral, graduate, and undergraduate students interested in comparative politics. He currently serves on the advisory board for the Electoral Integrity Project (2013-) and is a team member on an international project looking at Populism and the Future of Democracy (2021-).
His research has been funded by Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the United Kingdom’s Economic and Social Research Council, and the Tokyo Foundation for Policy Research. His articles: “Explaining variation in the success of extreme right parties in Western Europe” (Comparative political studies) and “Far right parties in Europe” (Annual review of political science) are of particular interest in episode 14 of ‘A History of Xenophobia’.
About Eoin O’Malley
Eoin O’Malley is an Associate Professor in political science at the School of Law and Government, Dublin City University. There he teaches politics and public policy and is the Director of the BA in Economics, Politics and Law.
His research specialism is Irish politics and particularly on the position of the Taoiseach and cabinet government in Ireland, though he also does work on the Irish party system, media coverage of Irish elections and public policy.
He has authored over forty articles in peer-review journals. Eoin wrote a textbook, Contemporary Ireland (Palgrave Macmillan 2011), and co-edited four other books on Irish politics. The most recent book is Resilient Reporting: Media Coverage of Irsh Elections since 1969. He is a former co-editor of Irish Political Studies. As a regular columnist in the Sunday Independent Eoin is a frequent contributor to national debates.
About David Art
David Art is Professor of Political Science at Tufts University. Professor Art’s field is comparative politics, with a regional focus on Europe and his research interests include extremist political parties and movements, the politics of history and memory, and comparative historical analysis in the social sciences.
He is the author of Inside the Radical Right: The Development of Anti-Immigrant Parties in Western Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and The Politics of the Nazi Past in Germany and Austria (Cambridge University Press, 2006). His articles have appeared in Comparative Politics, German Politics and Society, Party Politics, and West European Politics.
Professor Art is Co-Convenor of the European Consortium for Political Research’s (ECPR) Standing Group on Extremism and Democracy. During the 2008-2009 academic year he was a Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow at the European University Institute.
About Elizabeth Buettner
Elizabeth Buettner has been Professor of Modern History at the University of Amsterdam since 2014. Her research has centered on British imperial, social, cultural, and migration history since the late nineteenth century along with other European nations’ histories of late colonialism, decolonization, and their domestic ramifications.
Key publications include:
About William Brustein
William Brustein is Eberly Family Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at West Virginia University where he was also formerly Vice President for Global Strategies and International Affairs.
He has published widely in the areas of political extremism and ethnic/religious/racial prejudice. His publications include:
About Maddalena Marinari
Dr Maddalena Marinari is Associate Professor in History at Gustavus College in Minnesota. Maddalena has published extensively on immigration restriction and immigrant mobilization.
She is the author of Unwanted: Italian and Jewish Mobilization Against Restrictive Immigration Laws, 1882-1965 which came out in 2020 with University of North Carolina Press, and provides the foundation for much of the discussion in this episode since it focuses on US opposition to Italian and Jewish immigrants in the late 19th century and early 20th century and outlines how Italian and Jewish communities in the US responded.
Something that also informed the discussion is a special issue of the Journal of American History from 2022 that Maddalena co-edited with Erika Lee on the Immigration Act of 1924, which saw the US introduce an immigration quota system that substantially restricted immigration until the mid-1960s. Maddelena also co-edited, with Maria Cristina Garcia and Madeline Hsu, A Nation of Immigrants Reconsidered: U.S. Society in an Age of Restriction, 1924-1965 and she has a second related co-edited anthology coming out in 2023 with Maria Cristina Garcia titled Whose America? U.S. Immigration Policy since 1980 with the University of Illinois Press.
Maddelena is also one of the scholars behind the excellent #ImmigrationSyllabus, an online tool for anyone interested in understanding the history behind current debates on immigration in the US.
About Kathryn Pillay
Dr Kathryn Pillay is senior lecturer in sociology at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Her areas of teaching and research include that of ‘race’, migration, identity and belonging. Her most recent publication is the co-edited volume, Relating Worlds of Racism – Dehumanisation, Belonging and the Normativity of European Whiteness (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), which unmasks and foregrounds the ways in which notions of European whiteness have found form in a variety of global contexts that continue to sustain racism as an operational norm resulting in exclusion, violence, human rights violations, isolation and limited full citizenship for individuals who are not racialised as white.
About Mae Ngai
Mae M. Ngai is Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies and Professor of History, and Co-Director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University. She is a U.S. legal and political historian interested in the histories of immigration, citizenship, nationalism, and the Chinese diaspora. She is author of the award winning Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (2004); The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America (2010); and The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics (2021). Ngai has written on immigration history and policy for the Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, the Atlantic, the Nation, and Dissent. Before becoming a historian she was a labor-union organizer and educator in New York City, working for District 65-UAW and the Consortium for Worker Education. She is now writing Nation of Immigrants: A Short History of an Idea (under contract with Princeton University Press).
About Marilyn Lake
Marilyn Lake AO is Professorial Fellow in History at the University of Melbourne. Her books include ‘Drawing the Global Line: White men’s countries and the international challenge of racial equality’, co-authored with Henry Reynolds and published by Cambridge University Press; and ‘Progressive New World: How TransPacific exchange and settler colonialism shaped American reform’, published by Harvard University Press in 2019.
About Hidetaka Hirota
Hidetaka Hirota is Associate Professor in the Department of History at University of California Berkeley. He is a social and legal historian of the United States specializing in immigration. His major areas of research are the nineteenth-century United States; American immigration law and policy; the U.S. and the World; and transnational history. He is particularly interested in the history of American nativism and immigration control. His published works have examined the origins and early developments of U.S. immigration policy from the antebellum period to the Progressive Era. Adopting a social and legal history approach, his scholarship pays equal attention to the legal dimension of immigration control and the practical implementation of immigration laws on the ground.
About Leo Lucassen
Leo Lucassen is Professor of Global Labour and Migration History and director of the International Institute of Social History (IISH). His research focuses on Global Migration History, Integration, Migration Systems, Migration Controls, Gypsies and the state, State Formation and Modernity, and Urban History. Leo wants to stimulate interdisciplinary research on migration history and contribute to the public debate on migration.
About Elisabeth Ivarsflaten
Elisabeth Ivarsflaten is a Professor in the Department of Comparative Politics at the University of Bergen. She is the principal investigator of the Digital Social Science Core Facility (DIGSSCORE) and the Norwegian Citizen Panel at the University of Bergen.
Ivarsflaten holds a Ph.D. from the University of Oxford and was a Postdoctoral Prize Research Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford, before joining the University of Bergen faculty. She specializes in the study of public opinion and political parties. Her research has appeared in the American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, the European Journal of Political Research, and other peer-reviewed journals. Much of Ivarsflaten research, teaching and writing explores radical extreme right parties and social movements. She has also been engaged for many years in the development and application of innovative survey research.
About Ruth Wodak
Ruth Wodak is an Austrian linguist, who is Emeritus Distinguished Professor and Chair in Discourse Studies in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University and Professor in Linguistics at the University of Vienna.
Her research is mainly located in discourse studies and in critical discourse analysis. Her books include: ‘The Politics of Fear: What Right-Wing Populist Discourses Mean’ and ‘The Discourse of Politics in Action: Politics as Usual’.
About Lars Rensmann
Lars Rensmann is Professor of Political Science and Comparative Government at the University of Passau, Germany. Before joining Passau’s faculty, he was Professor European Politics and Society and Founding Director of the Research Centre for the Study of Democratic Cultures and Politics at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, where he also served as the Chair of the Department of European Languages and Cultures and led the chair group of European Politics and Society. He is a member of several scientific and editorial boards, including the Journal of International Political Theory.
Series host Irial Glynn and Yanli Xie discuss the reasons for making the series A history of xenophobia – from the goldmines to the rise of the far right today.
Irial Glynn
Dr Irial Glynn is a migration historian based at UCD School of History. His research focuses principally on the period after 1945. His current research principally revolves around three projects: 1) a comparative analysis of how migration has affected Irish society since 1945, 2) a global history of boat refugees since the 1940s, and 3) a study of how nativism has developed globally since the late 19th century.
In 2023 he was awarded €2m in funding as part of an ERC Consolidator grant for his study entitled ‘SOS’. This project will investigate the history of boat refugees since the 1940s, asking who hinders and who helps asylum seekers on their journeys, and why. He is the co-editor of History Hub at UCD.
Yanli Xie
Dr Yanli Xie is a tutor in UCD School of History. Her PhD looked at the role of railway technology transfer in the West-East interactions and the Anglo-Chinese relations from 1860s to 1890s.
Since 2011, researchers from a range of disciplines including History, Irish, English, Archaeology and Art History, have presented papers at Tudor and Stuart Ireland conferences. History Hub, in association with Real Smart Media, has produced more than 320 podcasts from these conferences.
UCD offers a variety of study options and entry pathways, ranging from full-time degrees to short-term courses for pure interest. Lifelong Learning offers all adult learners the opportunity to explore a subject of their choice without the pressure of an examination. Open Learning is a flexible way of studying history part-time at UCD. Explore your UCD History options for the coming year.
LGBT Activism in Ireland, 1973-2023: Looking Back, Going Forward is a UCD project which comprised of two workshops which were organised by Dr Mary McAuliffe (Director, UCD Gender Studies), in partnership with the National LGBT Federation (NXF), and funded by a Research Ireland New Foundations award.
The workshops – History of LGBT Activism in Ireland and Where We’re Going – Backlash, Solidarity, and Mobilising took place in UCD Humanities Institute in April 2025. Podcasts from the workshops are now available on History Hub.
Holocaust Education Ireland’s Holocaust Memorial Lecture for 2025 was given by Prof. Anthony McElligott from University of Limerick. A podcast of his lecture – “Surviving Liberation: Jewish Camp Survivors 1945-1948” – is now available on History Hub.
In 1972, Harlan J Strauss, a young American PhD student, came to Ireland and interviewed veterans of the Irish independence struggle – men and women, at this point in their 70s and 80s, who shared their experiences, sometimes for the first time.
Harlan’s tapes offer often unparalleled insights into both the experiences and perceptions of revolutionaries reflecting back on their youth. Now, 50 years later, Conor and Harlan have teamed up to delve into these interviews and get an insight into the mind of an Irish revolutionary.
This podcast series tells stories of women’s grassroots activism across the island of Ireland and in England from 1918 to the present. These stories highlight the diverse ways that members of the Irish Countrywomen’s Association (ICA), the Soroptimists International Great Britain and Ireland (SIGBI), the National Federation of Women’s Institutes (NFWI) and the Federation of Women’s Institutes of Northern Ireland (WINI) contributed to enhancing the lives of women and girls locally, nationally and globally. Funded by United Kingdom Research Innovation (UKRI) Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)
The Military Welfare History Network provides a networking and dissemination platform for scholars who are research active in military welfare history.
In 2024 the Military Welfare History Network (MWHN) hosted its third international conference at the University of Leeds on 20 and 21 June. Led by Prof Jessica Meyer, the organising team hosted a two-day event at Leeds on the theme of ‘Economies of Military Welfare: conversations between past and present’. The conference was generously supported by the University of Leeds and the Economic History Society. Two papers recorded at the conference are now available to podcast.
History Hub presents a series of interviews between our editor Dr Irial Glynn and a number of leading experts on the history of xenophobia. The key question the series grapples with is: what causes xenophobia? Why are certain people hostile towards or afraid of immigrants or of people who come from different cultural backgrounds? Does it stem from anger related to a real or perceived decline in living standards? Does it reflect discomfort with the pace of social change or increasing societal diversity? Or is it connected to the arrival of charismatic and innovative politicians and well-organised far right parties?
