Academic biography

Sparky Booker (sparky.booker@dcu.ie) is a historian of law, culture and society in late medieval Ireland. She is an Assistant Professor in history at the School of History and Geography at Dublin City University. Before she took this post in 2021, she was a lecturer in medieval Irish history at Queen’s University Belfast from 2016. From 2014-2016 she served as a postdoctoral research associate at Swansea University researching female plaintiffs in the secular and ecclesiastical courts of Ireland from c. 1350- c.1530.  

Sparky has published on many aspects of late medieval Irish history and is the author of Cultural Exchange and Identity in Late Medieval Ireland: the English and Irish of the Four obedient shires (2018), published by Cambridge University Press in their ‘Studies in Medieval Life and Thought’ series. This monograph was awarded the James S. Donnelly Prize and Donald Murphy Prize from the American Conference for Irish Studies in 2019. She was also the editor of Tales of Medieval Dublin (2014). She is on the committee of the Friends of Medieval Dublin and the Irish Legal History Society.