Academic biography

Sparky Booker (sparky.booker@dcu.ie) is a historian of law, culture, women 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. 

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 has published articles on a wide range of topics including sumptuary law (Speculum, 2021), medieval Irish women (IHS, 2022), Irish clergy (IHS, 2014), and ethnic enclaves in medieval Ireland and Wales (Proceedings British Academy, 2022). She is currently co-editor of the Irish Studies journal Studia Hibernica and 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.