Previous Research Projects
'Making War, Mapping Europe: Militarized Cultural Encounters, 1792-1920'
Before the age of mass tourism began, warfare was one of the most significant engines of cultural encounter in European history. Across Europe and on its frontiers, the era of mass armies inaugurated by the French Revolution involved millions of soldiers and civilians in cultural encounters to which they would not otherwise have been exposed. Funded by the Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) Joint Research Programme, 'Making War, Mapping Europe: Militarized Cultural Encounters, 1792-1920' brings together scholars from Trinity College Dublin, the Freie Universität Berlin and the Universities of York and Swansea to examine these encounters between soldiers and civilians across Europe and on its borders over the course of the long nineteenth century. By focusing on the experiences of British, French and German armies in Eastern Europe, Italy, the Balkans and the Middle East from the Revolutionary wars to the First World War it asks what impact these militarized encounters had upon these ordinary Europeans' sense of themselves and of the world beyond Europe's frontiers.
The 1641 Depositions (Trinity College Dublin, MSS 809-841) are witness testimonies mainly by Protestants, but also by some Catholics, from all social backgrounds, concerning their experiences of the 1641 Irish rebellion. The testimonies document the loss of goods, military activity, and the alleged crimes committed by the Irish insurgents, including assault, stripping, imprisonment and murder. This body of material is unparalleled anywhere in early modern Europe, and provides a unique source of information for the causes and events surrounding the 1641 rebellion and for the social, economic, cultural, religious, and political history of seventeenth-century Ireland, England and Scotland.
- Associated TCD Staff: Jane Ohlmeyer, Micheal O Siochru
- Associated universities: Aberdeen, Cambridge
The Irish Chancery Project, 1244 - 1509 seeks to reconstruct the records of the medieval Irish chancery, which were destroyed by the explosion and fire at the Four Courts in 1922. In the absence of the original rolls of chancery, the project team is drawing on copies, antiquarian transcripts and calendars ranging in date from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries and surviving in repositories in Ireland, England and North America. The result will be a new Calendar of Irish Chancery Letters, c.1244-1509 (known as CIRCLE), which will be published on the web. The publication of CIRCLE in 2011 will do much to revitalize late medieval Irish studies by providing both specialist researchers and the general public with ready access to an unparalleled source of information for the first time. The project's ancillary publications seek to set the medieval Irish experience of colonialism in a wider comparative framework.
- Associated TCD Staff: Peter Crooks, David Ditchburn, Sean Duffy, Katherine Simms. Associated universities: Bristol, Durham, Reading, St Andrews
Insular Christianity Project, 1530-1750 - The principal aims and objectives of the project are to provide a series of viable comparative investigations of selected aspects of a critically important historical process, resulting in landmark works of scholarship, and to raise the profile of religious history in Irish universities through the creation of a scholarly network centred on Dublin. This project is funded by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences.
- Associated TCD Staff: Robert Armstrong, Crawford Gribben
- Associated universities: UCD