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Life
1953- [Dr. Denis O’Hearn]; b. Carlsbad, New Mexico, of Irish and Native Alaskan (Aleut) descent; moved to Belfast in the 1970s and remained 20 years; grad. PhD. at Univ. of Michigan (Ann Arbor), 1988; worked as journalist; contrib. to In These Times and the Guardian; broadcast news of the H-Blocks prison (Maze/Long Kesh) to US readership; chair of Social and Economic Change at QUB from mid-1990s; Fulbright Scholar at University College Dublin in 1991-92; also taught Sociology at the Binghamton Univ., New York; appt. Dean of Liberal Arts at Univ. of Texas at El Paso in 2018.
Works
incl. Free Trade or managed Trade?: Trading Between Two Worlds [Ireland - Between two worlds series, 1] (Belfast: Centre for Research and Documentation 1994), 61pp.; The Atlantic Economy : Britain, the US and Ireland (Manchester UP 2001), xiii, 241pp., ill.; Bobby Sands: Nothing But an Unfinished Song (London: Pluto Press 2006), xiv, 434pp., ill.; ed. with by Ronaldo Munck, Critical Development Theory: Contributions to a new Paradigm ([London:] Zed Books 1999), xx, 217pp.
[ O’Hearn has a page with publication listings and access at Academia.edu in 2025 - online. ]
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University of Texas (El Paso) - Native American and Indigenous Studies: Denis O’Hearn is Unangan (Aleut). His research and teaching has concentrated on social theory; colonialism/imperialism and development; and imprisonment. He is author of many books and articles including Inside the Celtic Tiger; The Atlantic Economy; Nothing but an Unfinished Song: Bobby Sands, the Irish Hunger Striker Who Ignited a Generation; Living at the Edges of Capitalism: Adventures in Exile and Mutual Aid; and Migration, Racism and Labor Exploitation in the World-System. His current research compares Russian and US administration of enslavement of the Unangax̂ population on the Pribylov and Aleutian Islands in the 1860s-1880s. His great grandmother, Evdokia Sorokina (Makulova) was an Unangan orphan on Tanax̂ Amix̂ (St. Paul Island) in the Bering Sea during the 1860s and 1870s. Her community of 300 was enslaved and forced to kill 100,000 fur seals in June-August each year and then left to survive during the harsh winter months in the Bering Sea. His grandmother, Mariia O’Hearn (Sorokina), grew up in Unalaska, the main island in the Aleutian chain, amongst severe poverty and abbreviated life expectancy due to the extinction of sea mammals, tuberculosis and starvation. Mariia’s children were taken from her and sent hundreds of miles away by sea to a Baptist orphanage/”Indian school” near Kodiak. They escaped and the family, including O’Hearn’s father, migrated to Tacoma, Washington where she died of tuberculosis a few years later. (c.2022; available online; accessed 31.12.2025.)
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