Brendan O'Leary, Lauder Professor of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania

Brendan O'Leary is the Lauder Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania and World Leading Researcher Visiting Professor of Political Science at Queen's University Belfast. He is the inaugural winner of the Juan Linz Prize of the International Political Science Association for lifetime contributions to the study of federalism, democratization, and multinational states, and was recently elected an Honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy and to Membership of the US Council on Foreign Relations. Educated in Northern Ireland, Oxford, and the London School of Economics & Political Science he advised parties and governments during and after the making of the Good Friday Agreement. His extensive publications include Power-Sharing in Deeply Divided Places (co-editor, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), The Northern Ireland Conflict (OUP, 2004), and Explaining Northern Ireland (co-author, Blackwell, 1995).

Winner of the James S. Donnelly, Sr. Prize from the American Conference for Irish Studies
An Irish Times Book of the Year 2019

"He colors his work throughout with lively writing, moving past equivocation and pulling no punches in his assessments of participants or previous scholarship ... the author has thoughtfully structured his books and chapters in a way that is accessible to both non-experts and specialists. Whatever the audience, this is a work of canonical importance for understanding Northern Ireland ... Highly recommended." -- M. J. O'Brien, CHOICE

"The detailed coverage is astonishing, the range immense. The book exemplifies best practice in social science and history, combining both disciplines, asking analytic questions of the historical record and widening the remit of social science - above all by looking carefully both at political calculations and the details of constitutional arrangements. It is important to stress that he offers us an analytic history of Ireland as a whole, paying special attention to developments in the Irish Free State and to the Republic thereafter." -- John A Hall, McGill University in Montreal, Dublin Review of Books

"The most prolific, perceptive and powerfully analytical writer on the north in the last 35 years, Brendan O'Leary, has just produced his magnum opus." -- Brian Feeney, Irish News