Hugh Kearney

Hugh F. Kearney (born 1924, Liverpool, United Kingdom) is a British historian, and Amundson Professor Emeritus of the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of several articles on early modern economic history, a biography on Thomas Wentworth, and the acclaimed book British Isles: A History of Four Nations which advocated a multi-national, "Britannic" approach, rather than an Anglo-centric approach to their history, historiography and sociology. His daughter is The World at One presenter Martha Kearney.

Kearney read History at Peterhouse Cambridge in the 1940's. He met his wife while teaching at University College Dublin where she was an undergraduate. Kearney became, in 1962, one of the first academics (a lecturer of history) at the still-under-construction 'plate glass university', University of Sussex, where he taught in a temporary Nissen hut before the arts faculty buildings were completed. Kearney went on to teach courses on contemporary Britain; poetry, science and religion in seventeenth century England; religion and literature in the age of Pascal, and the politics and literature of Yeats and Joyce. Kearney made modern Irish history his major research interest, especially focusing on Ireland's relationship with the United Kingdom, and the British nations.

While at Sussex, Kearney spent three months at the Folger Library in Washington D.C., where he wrote an article Puritanism, Capitalism and the Scientific Revolution (published in Past and Present, 1964). During his time at Sussex, he also took a sabbatical in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In 1970 Kearney left Sussex to become Richard Pares Professor of history at the University of Edinburgh, and in 1975 moved on to the University of Pittsburgh, where he was Amundson Professor of British History until 1999. His is now Amundson Professor Emeritus.

While at Sussex, Kearney edited Problems and Perspectives in History (a series published by Longmans) in which he contributed the volume Origins of the Scientific Revolution. As result of this, he came to contribute a volume in the new World University Library (Science and Change 1500–1700, Weidenfeld, 1970) that was translated into German, Spanish and Japanese.

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