Francis Stewart Leland LyonsFBA (11 November 1923 – 21 September 1983) was an Irish historian and academic who served as the 40th Provost of Trinity College Dublin from 1974 to 1981.[1]
He was a lecturer in history at the University of Hull and then at Trinity College Dublin. He became the founding Professor of Modern History at the University of Kent in 1964,[2][3] serving also as Master of Eliot College from 1969 to 1972.[4]
His principal works include Ireland Since the Famine, the standard university textbook for Irish history from the mid-19th to late-20th century, which The Times called "the definitive work of modern Irish history" and a biography of Charles Stewart Parnell.[1]
Lyons was critical of Cecil Woodham-Smith's much-acclaimed history of the Great Irish Famine and has generally been considered among the "revisionist" historians who reconsidered the role of the British state in events like the Famine.[5]
Lyons married his wife Jennifer McAlister Lyons in 1954, and had two sons,[6] one of whom, Nicholas, is a former Lord Mayor of London. Following a short illness, Lyons died in Dublin in 1983, just shy of his 60th birthday.[1]