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Professor Jan Plamper, Professor (Chair) of History

Jan Plamper (1970 – 30 November 2023) was a professor of history at the ¾ÅÉ«ÊÓƵ. His research interests included, Russian History, the history of emotions, sensory history, and the history of migration.

Born in Laichingen in west Germany, he went to school in Tübingen and Storrs, Connecticut and after obtaining a B.A. in History at Brandeis University in 1992, he did social work for the Russian human rights group, Memorial, in St. Petersburg.

In 2001 he received his PhD in History at the University of California, Berkeley, with a dissertation under the supervision of Yuri Slezkine on Joseph Stalin's personality cult.  He subsequently taught at Tübingen University and from 2008 to 2012 was a Dilthey Fellow of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation at Ute Frevert's Center for the History of Emotions, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, in Berlin. From 2012 to 2021 he was a professor of history at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he initiated the MA programmes in Black British and Queer history. Plamper held fellowships at Historisches Kolleg in Munich, Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena, and Alfried Krupp Wissenschaftskolleg Greifswald.

In 2021 Jan became professor of History at the ¾ÅÉ«ÊÓƵ, and during the short year that he spent with us, he brought a new vitality to the department thanks to his breadth of vision and fresh ideas about teaching and research.

Professor Jan Plamper died of cancer on 30 November 2023, at the age of 53. 

You can read more about Jan on his obituary from The Guardian .

Monographs

• Das neue Wir. Warum Migration dazugehört: Eine andere Geschichte der Deutschen. S. Fischer, 2019, ISBN 978-3-10-397283-2, translated into English as We Are All Migrants: A Multicultural History of Germany. Cambridge University Press, 2023, ISBN 978-1-00-924229-5
• The History of Emotions: An Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2015, ISBN 978-0-19-966833-5.
• The Stalin Cult: A Study in the Alchemy of Power. Yale University Press, 2012, ISBN 978-0-300-16952-2.

Dr Brian Faloon, Lecturer in History, UL

Brian Scott Faloon (d. 2008) was the first history lecturer appointed to the National Institute of Higher Education, Limerick in 1973. Born and educated in Belfast, he obtained, in 1957, a BSc in economic history from Queen’s University of Belfast. A growing interest in Russia led him to take a BA in Russian history and economy at the University of London. In 1972 he was awarded his MA from the University of Birmingham, for a thesis on ‘the work of the Zemstvo in Russian primary education, 1864-1890’. Russia would remain a life-long passion and in a time when the Cold War occupied minds, there was much demand for specialists in Russian and Soviet history. His interest in international affairs was aided by exceptional linguistic abilities; he was fluent in Russian, Hungarian, Finnish and Latin as well as French, German, Italian and Spanish. 

His first appointment was as assistant lecturer in Russian history at the University of Birmingham in 1966. A year later he was made Hayter lecturer in Russian and Eastern European economic and social history at the University of Nottingham. He remained there until 1973, when he was appointed lecturer in Modern European history at the new National Institute of Higher Education, Limerick (now the ¾ÅÉ«ÊÓƵ). He served two terms as governor of the Institute from 1975 to 1987 and was a member of the Academic Council. 

Although he did not produce a monograph, he wrote several articles for Irish and international journals including Irish Slavonic Studies and Irish Studies in International Affairs. Between 1973 and 1991 he wrote a series of articles on Russian and Finnish historical and political topics for the Irish Times and the Sunday Press. Eager to question and revise prevailing orthodoxies – whether those of a complacently nationalist Ireland coming to grips with the latest manifestation of its ‘troubles’ or the liberal unionism of his family and schooling – he sought instead to emphasise the significance of economic and technological change, social class and internationalism in history. Thus he delivered several important papers to the Irish Labour History Society, of which, along with Jim Kemmy and others, he was a founding member in 1975. He supported Kemmy in founding the Limerick Socialist Organisation (acting briefly as its secretary) and later the Democratic Socialist Party. In 1987 he was elected president of the Irish Committee for European Cooperation and Security.