Dr. Niall Michael Buckley is an assistant professor of Irish Studies and the Core (History). He completed an undergraduate degree in European Studies (consisting of History, German, Italian and Political Science) from Trinity College Dublin. Building upon this transnational comparative foundation, he undertook doctoral studies featuring extensive archival trips to Vienna, Washington D.C. and Rome, for his recently completed PhD thesis “Europe and the Habsburg Question 1916-1955.” He has presented conference papers and lectures at various locations from Jerusalem to Vienna on the topics of Interwar paramilitary cultures and Third-Way Political Catholicism situated between –and above– the organized Naturalism of materialist Liberalism and atheistic Collectivism.

His current research seeks to address the crossroads of Catholic statesmanship in Ireland and Austria between 1918 and 1945. Drawn to the challenge that Catholic Social teaching –as expressed in Quas Primas (1925) and Quadragesimo Anno (1931)– presents to modernity, his work investigates the role of Church authority in legitimizing and delegitimizing temporal power in the face of paramilitary violence. Therein, he is examining divergent democratic and autocratic conceptualizations of how to create a constitutional order anchored on the principle of the Kingship of Christ throughout the previous century.