Gerald Power, Ph.D.

Gerald Power is senior lecturer at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences. Power completed a liberal arts degree at the American College Dublin before undertaking doctoral studies at the National University of Ireland, Galway.

His PhD thesis was published in 2012 as A European Frontier Elite: The Nobility of the English Pale in Tudor Ireland, 1496-1566 (Hannover). He also edited, with Ondřej Pilný, a collection of essays on Ireland and the Czech Lands: Connections and Comparisons in History and Culture (Bern, 2014).

Dr. Power’s research interests have recently broadened to encompass problems in modern British foreign policy. He has published studies on the reception of Margaret Thatcher in the Czech lands and British cultural diplomacy in the Middle East, and is currently researching princely education as a diplomatic tool in the British world of the late Empire and Cold War.

Dr. Power organizes the popular Meet the Ambassador series at AAU, which brings together students and diplomats in open discussion, and has been chair of the Department of History and Philosophy since 2022.

He welcomes students wishing to research theses in the areas of early modern history, British imperial history, the history of education, cultural diplomacy/soft power, and Britain and the Arab Gulf.

Specializations:

British and Irish history, European history, history of British foreign policy, cultural diplomacy, Tudor British Isles

Select Publications:

POWER, Gerald. ‘The British Council, English Language Teaching and Britain’s Struggle for Educational Influence in Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar, 1955-69.’ Middle Eastern Studies 59.5 (2023): 777-789

POWER Gerald. ‘Education, Culture, and the British Position in the Arabian Gulf: The Establishment of the British Council in Kuwait, 1952-1955’. Britain & The World 15.1 (2022): pp. 47-65.

POWER Gerald and WEINFURTER Jaroslav. ‘Czech Responses to Thatcher and Thatcherism: The Evidence of the Newspapers, 1984-2013’, Central European Journal of International and Security Studies 11.4 (2017):. 44-65.

POWER Gerald. ‘Legitimizace moci na anglickém trůně [Legitimacy of the power of the English crown].’ In BĚRÁNEK Ondřej, ČERMANOVÁ Pavlína and HRUBY Jakub (eds.) Jedno slunce na nebi, jeden vládce na zemi: legitimace moci ve světě 14. století [One sun in heaven, one government on earth: the legitimization of power in the world of the fourteenth century], Prague: Academia, 2017. pp. 106-26.

POWER Gerald and MAGINN Christopher (eds). Frontiers, States and Identity in Early Modern Ireland and Beyond. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2016, pp. 240.

POWER Gerald and WEINFURTER Jaroslav. Thatcherismus v českých zemích: Vývoj a recepce [Thatcherism in the Czech Lands: development and reception]. Prague: Libri, 2015, pp. 164.

POWER Gerald and PILNÝ Ondřej (eds). Ireland and the Czech Lands: Contacts and Comparisons in History and Culture. Bern: Peter Lang, 2014, pp. 235.

POWER Gerald. ‘Gypsies and Sixteenth-Century Ireland’. Romani Studies 21.2 (2014): 203-9.

POWER Gerald. A European Frontier Elite: The Nobility of the English Pale in Tudor Ireland, 1496-1566. The Formation of Europe vol. 4. Hannover: Wehrhahn Verlag, 2012, pp. 215.