The nature of Ireland's place within the British Empire continues to attract significant public and scholarly attention. While historians of Ireland have long accepted the complexity of Ireland's imperial past as both colonised and coloniser, the broader public debate has grown more heated in recent months, buffeted by Brexit, the Decade of Centenaries and global events. At the same time, the imperatives of social movements such as Black Lives Matter and Decolonising the Curriculum have asked us to reflect on the assumptions, hierarchies and norms underpinning the structures of society, including the production of knowledge and the higher education system. This round table brings together scholars from diverse disciplinary and methodological backgrounds to examine the prospects, possibilities and challenges of what decolonising Irish history might mean for our field. It sets these discussions within broader frameworks, considering both the relationship of Irish historical writing to postcolonial theory and the developments in the latter field in the last twenty years. It also reflects on the sociology of our discipline and makes suggestions for future research agendas.

爱尔兰在大英帝国中的地位继续吸引着公众和学术界的广泛关注。虽然爱尔兰历史学家长期以来一直接受爱尔兰帝国作为殖民者和殖民者的复杂性，但近几个月来，受到英国退欧、百年纪念和全球事件的冲击，更广泛的公共辩论变得更加激烈。与此同时，诸如“黑人的命也是命”和“非殖民化课程”等社会运动的迫切需要，要求我们反思支撑社会结构的假设、等级制度和规范，包括知识的生产和高等教育系统。本次圆桌会议汇集了来自不同学科和方法背景的学者来审视前景，非殖民化爱尔兰历史可能对我们的领域意味着什么的可能性和挑战。它将这些讨论置于更广泛的框架内，既考虑了爱尔兰历史写作与后殖民理论的关系，也考虑了后殖民理论在过去 20 年中的发展。它还反映了我们学科的社会学，并为未来的研究议程提出了建议。