Outreach

We make economic history more accessible by removing jargon and translating academic research. We encourage and support academics to embrace economic history in new and exciting ways.

 

Want to connect? Email us at cephoutreach@tcd.ie

Featured outreach:

How we engage with schools, policymakers, academics and the general public

We believe economic history offers a unique opportunity for people to understand the world they live in, balancing lessons from the past with the tools for understanding the present and the future.

Our “Four Ps” of Pupils, Pedagogy, Policy and Public ensure a broad-church approach that does not fall into the traditional trap of pontificating that many academic projects suffer from. We engage these groups through events, workshops and CPD courses, all of which are designed to make learning about economic history engaging, accessible and fun.

Our strategy was developed alongside similar initiatives, including the CAGE Research Centre at the University of  Warwick, and Discover Economics, a Royal Economic Society-funded project which champions the discipline of economics more broadly.

Bringing economic history into the classroom

We have developed a bespoke workshop designed to introduce school pupils to economic history. It dovetails with the existing curriculum and offering a useful resource to teachers who may wish to try something new.

“Can you run Ireland” places a classroom of teenagers in the shoes of the Irish governments between 1922 and 2022, asking them to make budget and policy decisions to guide the Irish Free State and Republic of Ireland through its first century of existence. 

Want to bring this workshop to your classroom? Click here to find out more.

Teaching and Learning Resources

Classroom materials for economics and history teachers

Here you will find our library of teaching and learning resources that present cutting edge economic history research in an accessible and easily-understood manner. These are suitable for use in both the UK A-Level and Irish Leaving Cert economics curricula, as well as history, politics and CSPE. 

These resources were developed in partnership with the CAGE Research Centre at the University of  Warwick, and Discover Economics, a Royal Economic Society-funded project which champions the discipline of economics more broadly.

Economic history for everyone

Can economics help us understand why the Irish Famine was so severe? What explains Ireland’s long economic boom of the eighteenth century? Why did the North and South develop differently? Is Ireland ‘rich’?

Our open online course, The Development of the Irish Economy, will answer these and other questions about Ireland’s unlikely path to economic development. The course explores how various pressures and policies have shaped the development of the Irish economy over the last three centuries, highlighting the different external and internal forces that influence the Irish economy, the role played by policy, and the successes and failures across over three centuries of history. And it highlights important common themes over that long time span, relevant to understanding the Irish economy today.

Introducing the long-run perspective to policymakers

In a world in which so much is deemed to be ‘unprecedented’, a long-run perspective can help to navigate testing times. History has the advantage of having already happened, and understanding the decisions taken in the past and the outcomes they brought are crucial to the implementation of effective policy.

To address this, CEPH has developed a Continuous Professional Development course specifically designed for civil servants and policy professionals which demonstrates the value of the long run perspective in their work. By introducing them to historical case studies and archival material, and deploying modern gamification techniques, we are able to change the way they think about the past, and encourage them to learn from past policy successes and failures in brand new ways.

The CEPH podcast

Have you ever wondered why you cannot take a train to Donegal? Or how the Irish housing market came to be the way it is today? How do you found a nation from scratch? What is a financial bubble?

Join Andrew Dorman and Lloyd Maphosa as they interview some of the world’s best economic historians and answer these, and many more questions besides. Each episode showcases new and exciting research, as Andrew and Lloyd chat with different experts about their latest publications. We explore a diverse array of subjects that show how the lessons from the past are extremely important for the present, and even more so for the future!

Listen here.

Recordings and videos

Miss one of our lectures? Want to see what we do live when we participate in festivals? Check out our library of live events and recordings, including participation in the ESRC Festival of Social Science and our Alice Murray Distinguished Scholar lectures.