Life
1927-2012; b. New York; son of namesake, a Chicago-born son of Irish migrants who had been raised in Galway and fought in the War of Independence; Larkin Jnr. served in the US Army at the end of WWII and went to university on the GI Bill; grad. NYU and PhD at Columbia with a year on Fulbright Schol. at LSE (London), 1956-57; taught at Brookyn Coll. and MIT (Boston), before settling at Chicago U (ret. 2002); influenced by David Greene (NYU) and historians Sir Lewis Napier and Elie Halévy; wrote ground-breaking articles on the Devotional Revolution in American Historical Review (1972, 1975), identifying intense religious practice with the post-famine Catholic church and people; biographer of Jim Larkin (1876-1947) - though bearing no familial no relation to him - and authority on Irish
Church-state relations but not a practicising Catholic; co-fnd. of American Conference for Irish Studies (ACIS).
[There is an article on Larkin by Douglas Kanter in the RIA Dictionary of Irish Biography (Cambridge Online 2019) which includes an account of Larkin’s life , work and character and a bibl. of obituaries and and tributes; see download copy at the Chicago U. History Dept. site - online; accessed 05.09.2023.]
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Works
James Larkin: Irish Labour Leader 1876-1947 (1965; rep. 1968);
‘Devotional Revolution in Ireland 1850-1875, in The American Historical Review, 77 (1972), pp.625-52; ‘Church, State and Nation in Modern Ireland’, in The American Historical Review, 80 (1975), pp.124-76; Historical Dimension of Irish Catholicism (Washington: CUA Press
1984); In the Footsteps of Big Jim: A Family Biography ([Dublin:] Blackwater Press 1996), 252pp.
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