Researching Michael Lynch

Lynch stood unsuccessfully as a Fianna Fáil candidate for Dáil Éireann for the Meath constituency at the 1977 and 1981 general elections, before winning a seat there at the February 1982 general election. He was defeated at the November 1982 general election, but was then elected to the 17th Seanad Éireann on the Administrative Panel.

He was returned to the Dáil at the 1987 general election, but after a further defeat at the 1989 general election (by his Fianna Fáil colleague Mary Wallace) he did not stand for the Dáil again. He was also unsuccessful in the 1993 elections to the 20th Seanad.

He was a long-serving member of Meath County Council for the Kells electoral Area for many years, ultimately retiring at the 2009 local elections.

Lynch owned and ran the Ceili House pub in Oldcastle.

He died on 21 May 2019, aged 84.

From 2002-2012 he was the editor of Social Studies of Science. In 2016, he won the Society for Social Studies of Science's J. D. Bernal Prize for distinguished contributions to the field.

Lynch was born in Aberdeen. He was educated at Aberdeen Grammar School before taking degrees at the University of Aberdeen and the University of London. His first academic post was a lectureship in the history department at University College, Bangor (now Bangor University) from 1971–1979. From there he took up a lectureship in the Scottish history department at the University of Edinburgh, where, in 1993, he was appointed Sir William Fraser Professor of Scottish History and Palaeography, holding this Chair—the oldest and most distinguished Scottish history professorship in the world—until his retirement in 2005. As Professor he served as chairman of the Ancient Monuments Board for Scotland (1996-2002), president of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland (1996-1999), and a trustee of the National Museum of Scotland (2002-2005).

Upon his retirement, Lynch was named an honorary research professor at Edinburgh, and latterly an honorary professorial fellow at the same university.

Lynch is not to be confused with Michael J. Lynch (born 1938), a British historian at the University of Leicester who specializes in Nazi Germany, Mao's China and Stalinist Russia.

Along with Al Stewart and Andrew Heard, Lynch is a director of the Geneva Push, an Australian church planting network.

Commenting on the inverted red crosses of the Dark Mofo Winter Festival public art installation, Lynch was reported as observing that "My immediate reaction was a bit of an eye roll — here we go, a shock jock statement that gets Christians grumpy. It's a religious symbol and so for some people it is precious, so of course, people are going to find that hurtful. For Christians, the cross is a symbol of shame and it's about God taking on shame for the salvation of the word, so there's a weird irony in getting offended by a symbol which in itself is offensive."

Born and raised in Harnett County, North Carolina, he studied at Goddard College and the University of Iowa. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on the poetry of Wallace Stevens. He moved to Toronto in 1971 with his then-wife Gail Jones, and from 1971 to 1990 he taught in the Department of English at the University of Toronto at both the main and Erindale College campuses.

After coming out as a gay man in 1973, Lynch was a writer and a contributing editor for The Body Politic. In 1974, he taught the first gay studies course offered at a Canadian university, through the University of Toronto's School of Continuing Education. He was a founding member of the Toronto chapter of Gay Alliance Toward Equality and the Gay Academic Union. In 1980, he convened the first academic conference on the topic of Walt Whitman's 1880 visit to London, Ontario. He helped found the Toronto Centre for Lesbian and Gay Studies, which continues to offer an annual academic grant in his name.

Lynch was a committed AIDS activist from the dawn of the AIDS crisis in 1981 until his death in 1991, including as a founding member of AIDS Action Now!, the AIDS Committee of Toronto and the AIDS Memorial in Toronto's Barbara Hall Park.

In 1989 he published the poetry collection These Waves of Dying Friends.

At the time of his death, he had an unfinished gay studies manuscript, The Age of Adhesiveness: From Friendship to Homosexuality, in development. The book was an expansion of an earlier academic paper, for which he won Crompton-Noll Award from the Lesbian and Gay Caucus of the Modern Languages Association in 1981. He also served as the editor of the Lesbian and Gay Caucus's Gay Studies Newsletter.