'IRCHSS Awards' - Scheme 2: Postdoctoral Fellowship 2007

Assessment Board Members

• Professor Przemyslaw Urbanczyk
(Chair of Board)
Institute of Archaeology & Ethnology
Polish Academy of Sciences

• Professor Michael Banner
ESRC Genomics Policy and Research Forum
University of Edinburgh

• Professor Stefan Berger
School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures,
The University of Manchester

• Professor Harriet Bradley
Department of Sociology
University of Bristol

• Dr Marga Diaz-Andreu,
Department of Archaeology,
Durham University.

• Professor Marianne Elliott
The Institute of Irish Studies
The University of Liverpool

• Professor Robin Elliott
Faculty of Music
University of Toronto

• Professor Heinz Fassmann
Department of Geography
University of Vienna

• Professor Marilyn Gaddis-Rose
Department of Comparative Literature
Binghamton University

• Professor Christopher Gane
Professor of Scots Law & Vice-Principal
University of Aberdeen

• Professor Luke Gibbons
College of Arts & Letters
University of Notre Dame

• Professor Alan Hughes
Judge Institute of Management & the Centre for Business Research
University of Cambridge

• Professor Michael Kenneally
Faculty of Arts & Sciences
Concordia University

• Dr Simon Lee
Department of History of Art & Architecture
The University of Reading

• Professor Brendan O’Leary
Lauder Professor of Political Science
University of Pennsylvania

• Professor Donald Pease
English Department
Dartmouth College

• Professor Richard Sharpe
Faculty of History
University of Oxford.

Postdoctoral Fellowships were awarded to the following applicants for 2007-2008

 

Karen Elizabeth Brown UCD
"Word and Image Interactions in Early Twentieth-Century Irish Literary and Visual
Culture."

Focusing on the Yeats family circle, this project investigates how interactions between literature and the visual arts engendered transitions in early twentieth-century Irish culture, from the Irish Revival through to the emergence of Irish Modernism.

Eoin Carolan TCD
"Public Bodies and Institutional Separation: The Separation of Powers Theory Going
Forward."

An analysis of the implications for the contemporary practice of law and politics of any adoption of a theory of separation which acknowledges, and attempts to positively embrace, the existence and influence of independent public bodies.

Denis Condon NUIM
"Charity Bazaars and the Adoption of Technologized Popular Culture in Ireland in the
1890s and 1900s. "

This project demonstrates the key role large charity bazaars played in the introduction into Ireland of technological mass culture, exploring the implications of their status as charity events organised by the social elite.

David Coughlan UCC
"Ghosts of American Writing."

The research project studies the ghosts in the writings of contemporary American authors (Auster, DeLillo, Morrison, Pynchon, and Roth), and argues that the nature of the ghost, associated with the artistic practice, illuminates the authors’ reflexive approach to writing about a traumatic past.

Caroline Crowley UCC
"Farm succession and diversification: expectations, potential and outlook.

This project aims to survey potential farm successors to assess their opinions of farm diversification and the opportunities and barriers they experience in relation to farming and to relate their opinions to their education levels and geography.

Borbála Faragó UCD
"Performing Medbh McGuckian."

This project entails the production of an accessible scholarly monograph on the poetry of Medbh McGuckian. It applies performance and singularity theory in an innovative fashion to the study of creativity, which allows for a new perspective on central but previously neglected themes in her work.

David Finnegan TCD
"The Impact of the Counter-Reformation on the Political Thinking of Irish Catholics,
c.1540-c.1640."

This project locates the Irish early modern experience in a European context by tracing the impact of Counter-Reformation political thinking in Ireland through an exegesis of the religio-political writings of Irish clerics educated on the continent.

David Fleming UL
"The Government and Politics of Provincial Ireland, 1691-1761. "

This research will add to an increasing volume of work that is reappraising present views of Ireland in the eighteenth century. The move away from parliamentary politics and the capital to the cultures of urban and rural places is becoming evident within the historical profession. This research project will provide the basis for a more rounded view of the Irish provinces in the eighteenth century, together with work already published on south Munster, the Midlands and Ulster.

John Gibney NUIG
" The 1641 Rebellion in History and Memory."

The project is conceived of as a history of perceptions of the 1641 rebellion, from circa 1690 to the present. It is intended to analyse the nature of these perceptions, how they were disseminated and reproduced, and how such dissemination and reproduction shaped Protestant political identities in Ireland over time.

Marnie Hay TCD
"Irish Nationalism and Youth, 1900-23."

This project explores the connection between Irish nationalism and youth in the period of 1900-23 within the context of European youth movements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It will examine: 1) activities, organisations and propaganda aimed at youth and 2) contributions made to the nationalist movement by youth.

Kay Inckle TCD
"Flesh Wounds? New Ways of Understanding Self-Injury."

This project utilises innovative sociological research methods to engage with and represent the experiences of women/girls who self-injure. The resulting book will facilitate dialogue between those who self-injure and those who work and live with them, including: health and welfare service providers, professionals, family members, employers, colleagues and friends.

Andrew Jorgensen UCD
" Meanings of Thumb: A Semantic Error Theory."

In a monograph length argument, this project will examine the dominant representational schema connecting meaning and truth: Sentence S is true-in-language-L if and only if p. Drawing on my previous research, and recent developments, the research argues it cannot bear the explanatory demands placed upon it.

Sylvie Kleinman TCD
" Theobald Wolfe Tone in France and French-Occupied Europe, 1796-1798: A Cultural
Perspective."

This book-length project will fill a gap in scholarship on Tone by examining the cultural dimension of his life and travels during the last three years of his life, cross-referencing his own writings with contemporary sources.

Conor Kostick TCD
"The Second Crusade (1146-8): A Social Analysis."

This project proposes a close examination of the Latin sources for the second crusade with a view to creating a comprehensive understanding of the social context of these texts. Its goal is to enrich our understanding of the social complexity of the movement and the era more generally.

David Larkin UCD
" Deeds of Music made Visible: Interaction between Symphonic and Stage Genres in
Richard Strauss’s Oeuvre."

Although Strauss’s career partitions into a period of symphonic composition followed by an operatic phase, there was actually a productive cross-fertilisation between the symphonic and the dramatic in both genres. Researching this underappreciated aspect of the tone poems and the stage works will shed new light on Strauss’s compositional processes.

Gerald Manning DIAS
" The Preparation of a Critical Edition of the Early Irish Law-Text Entitled Uraicecht
Becc."

The preparation of a critical edition of the early Irish law-text entitled Uraicecht Becc
Uraicecht Becc is an early Irish law-tract that deals with the topic of status or societal rank in Ireland. This project will entail the production of a restored version of the text, a translation, textual notes and introduction.

Maria McHale UCD
" Singing for Ireland: Identity and Ideology in Nineteenth-Century Irish Song."

This project is concerned with examining musical culture, and especially song, as an agent for promoting various, and often, interrelated identities and ldeologies in nineteenth century Ireland. Discussions include: temperence musical culture and song; political songs and the development of romantic-nationalist ballads as well as debates on music and morality.

Jason McHugh NUIG
" Catholic Politics in the Stuart Kingdoms, 1641-85: Theory and Practice."

The proposed project comprises a study of Catholic clerical ideology in the period 1666-1685 and its influence on the secular policies of Catholics in a Three Kingdoms context. Building on previous research, this project is part of a wider study of Catholic politics from 1641 to 1685.

Terence Meagher TCD
" Anscombe’s Philosophy of Action: its Origins, Influence and Significance."

This project will contextualise and critically examine G.E.M. Anscombe’s classic but under-studied text Intention, showing its origins in the later Wittgenstein, its importance as a critique of causal accounts of action and its seminal influence on 20th-century philosophy of action.

Barry Molloy UCD
" The Birth of the Sword: The Evolution of Weapons and Warfare in Bronze Age Europe."

The first weapons of interpersonal combat evolved throughout Europe in the Bronze Age and this project analyses the social context of this evolution and the location of elite warrior ideologies and praxis in this process.


Máirín Ní Cheallaigh TCD
" Monuments Imagined: Perceptions of Archaeological Monuments in Ireland Between c.
1780 and 1914."

This project involves bringing to publication a monograph on the ways in which archaeological monuments were understood and were incorporated into the fabric of contemporary thought and society in Ireland between c. 1780 and 1914. Building upon previous research, it will examine how monuments formed and reflected Irish identities.

Kathryn Nicol UCD
" Race, Nation and the Politics of Violence in the Fiction of Toni Morrison."

This research analyses the representation of violence in Morrison’s work, and argues that this representation can be read as a critical intervention into the intertwined ideologies of race, violence, belonging and exclusion in modern American society and culture. It engages in a close analysis of the production of racial identity in Morrison’s texts, to argue that racial difference is constructed through culturally and historically situated relations of power.

Deaglán Ó Donghaile NUIM
" The Imagination of Urban Chaos: Reading Terrorism in Modern Literature."

This project will examine popular fictions and journalism of the later nineteenth century alongside twentieth-century modernist texts that feature the theme of terrorism. Analysing fictions about the Irish ‘dynamiters’ and anarchism, along with journals of the anarchist press, it will discuss terrorism’s stylistic and political influence over modernist writers.

Mary O’Regan DCU
" Media Representations and the Construction of Irish Foreign Policy: An Analysis of
Contemporary Lebanon and Iraq."

This Project proposes to explain the linkages that occur between Irish foreign policy positions and media constructions of developments in Lebanon and Iraq. An analysis of the political and foreign-policy contexts defining Ireland-Lebanon and Ireland-Iraq relations will, therefore, be integrated with an analysis of key periods of Irish media discourses and relevant public opinion trends.

Kinga Olszewska NUIG
" The Emergence of European Identity in Ireland and Poland."

This project will investigate the changing configurations of national and European identity in Polish and Irish cultural production from 1990 to the present. It will show that both Poland and Ireland’s experiences of postnational cultural formation can offer a useful perspective on the nature of European identity.

Nadine Rossol UL
" Policing as Pedagogy: The Police, the State and Civic Identity in Germany, 1920s-
1950s."

This research represents an innovative project examining the policing of the community, its educative functions and its reshaping according to political, social and cultural changes. Police officers, local officials and the public constantly redefined their own role(s) within this process.

Paul Anthony Ryan NUIM
" An alternative social history of the emotional lives of Irish men, 1963–80."

This project explores and challenges an understanding of Irish masculinity as emotionally inexpressive. This understanding is explored through the pages of Angela Macnamara’s problem page and challenged by a life history study of men who had accessed her column to reveal a more multi-dimensional understanding of Irish masculinity.

James Shanahan TCD
" An “Unburied Corpse”: The 1798 Rebellion in Fiction, 1799-1898."

This project builds on research focused on full-length fiction written about or against the background of the 1798 rebellion in Ireland from 1799 up to the centenary of the rebellion in 1898. Treating these fictions as historical and cultural artefacts in their own right, it traces the ways in which the rebellion was represented and interpreted the novels within the context of their own times and as part of what has been termed the ‘matrix of memory’ of 1798.

Sally Victoria Smith UCD
" The Peasantry in Ireland and England, 1200-1500 AD: Comparative Archaeologies of
Class and Gender Identity in the Middle Ages."

This project is the first-ever comparative study of the peasantries of medieval Ireland and England using theoretically-informed archaeological methodologies. Its aim is to explore the spatiality’s and materiality’s of class differentiation (grades of free tenant and unfree tenant, for example) and of gender construction in parallel medieval environments.

Caroline Walsh UCD
"Cultural Inclusivity in Human Rights Thinking. "

This project aims to progress normative thinking on the relationship between dialogue, toleration of cultural pluralism, the conception of equal moral worth and human rights by critically evaluating the serious implications for cultural inclusivity of some dialogically-challenged cosmopolitan accounts of human rights.

 

Funded by the Irish Government under the National Development Plan 2007-2013.