An Aberdeen scholar has achieved a double first by being appointed as Aberdeen's first female professor of history and the first professor of Irish history in Scotland.
Dr Jane Ohlmeyer, who joined the University of Aberdeen as a lecturer in 1995, and was appointed a senior lecturer last year, has been made Professor in Irish History at Aberdeen's History Department. She is the first woman to hold a Chair in the 102-year-old Department.
Professor Ohlmeyer described the appointment as a ‘tremendous personal honour’. She said: "I see many other excellent female academics working throughout the University and I hope that this is the first of many such promotions, especially in disciplines that traditionally have been dominated by men - at Aberdeen and at the other ancient Scottish universities.
"Women constitute 51 per cent of the student body at Aberdeen, which makes it increasingly important to have female academics working as senior members of staff at a departmental, faculty and university level."
Professor Ohlmeyer is a graduate of St Andrews University, the University of Illinois, and Trinity College Dublin. Her PhD was on the political career of the seventeenth-century Gaelic warlord Randal MacDonnell. She has taught at Yale University, New York University, and the University of California at Santa Barbara and was awarded a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship in 1999 for a two-year study of the Aristocracy in Seventeenth Century Ireland.
An early modern Irish and British historian, Professor Ohlmeyer is author and editor of over 20 books and articles including The Civil Wars: A Military History of England, Scotland and Ireland
1638-1660 with the late John Kenyon. She is currently working on a further three books including a 500-page portrait of The Irish Peerage in the Seventeenth Century for Yale University Press.
A Trustee of the National Library of Scotland and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, Professor Ohlmeyer is also a member of American Historical Association, the American Conference of Irish Studies, and is on the editorial board of The History Scotland Project.
Professor C Duncan Rice, Principal and Vice-Chancellor, said that this appointment sent an important message to the academic community in Aberdeen and Scotland: "I have always stressed the need to recognise the talents of female scholars. It is enormously important, intellectually and socially, to try and create a gender balanced academic community. We have a long way to go - but I have to say that after twenty years of making distinguished appointments on both sides of the Atlantic, I have rarely seen a stronger set of opinions from senior scholars in a discipline. She is one of the very best."
Allan Macinnes, Burnett-Fletcher Professor of History and Head of Aberdeen's History Department, said: "This is a very exciting appointment. Professor Ohlmeyer is a hugely talented historian of early modern Britain and Ireland. She has made a significant contribution to our Department's research reputation in creating an important shift away from the Anglocentric perspective of British history to presenting our past from Scottish perspectives."
Professor Tom Devine, University Research Professor in Scottish History and Director of Aberdeen's Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies, said: "History needs many voices of both sexes. Professor Ohlmeyer has championed the work of the Institute both in Ireland and the United States, and I am extremely pleased that she has been recognised in this way."
Professor Ohlmeyer is married with two children. She took up her new post on December 1, 2000.
University Press Office on telephone +44 (0)1224-273778 or email a.ramsay@admin.abdn.ac.uk.