Dr. Pádraic Whyte
Associate Prof in Children's Literature, English
Research Associate, Children's Research Centre

Projects

• Title
  • The National Collection of Children's Books
• Summary
  • National Collection of Children's Books In 2015 I completed a two-year interdisciplinary and inter-institutional digital humanities project funded by the Irish Research Council. With Dr Keith O'Sullivan (Church of Ireland College of Education), I received funding of over €352,000 to establish a National Collection of Children's Books. Research outputs from the project included a symposium, a public exhibition, a volume of essays, and a wesbite with catalogue and database that facilitates the exploration of over 250,000 children's books in over 90 languages from five libraries in Dublin: Trinity College Library; Church of Ireland College of Education Library; Dublin City Library and Archive, Pearse Street; the National Library of Ireland; and Cregan Library, St Patrick's College, Drumcondra (DCU). I was co-principal investigator on the project and hired two postdoctoral researchers and one research assistant. The team was based at the School of English, TCD, and we collaborated with a number of national and international experts in the field. Initially, the project aimed to create a catalogue containing 40,000 books and a database with 200 entries. It surpassed its goals significantly and finished with a user-friendly catalogue of over 250,000 books and a database containing over 500 entries. We ensured that external, expert evaluation of the catalogue informed all stages and aspects of the project. More information on the project, its parameters and aims, can be found at nccb.tcd.ie. Freely available podcasts from the NCCB symposium and exhibition document the project's journey in detail. Launched in December 2015, the NCCB website (nccb.tcd.ie) has had over 30,000 unique users. This extremely high usage demonstrates that this is a high-impact research output, with users from all over the world accessing the site, and thousands returning for multiple use. The National Collection of Children's Books project is the first national project anywhere in the world to attempt to bring together disparate children's book collection, as the basis for a potential national collection, in the form of an open-access, online catalogue. Internationally respected scholars in the field - Professor Emeritus Peter Hunt (Cardiff University), Jill Shefrin (senior research associate in Arts, Trinity College, University of Toronto), Timothy Young (curator of the Betsy Beinecke Shirley Collection of American Children's Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University) and Andrea Immel (Curator of the Cotsen Children's Library, Princeton University) - have endorsed the project and argue for its significance. The creation of the NCCB centralised catalogue democratised the resources of the five libraries involved in the project by enabling specialists and non-specialists to easily access information on their children's literature holdings. The NCCB catalogue includes books from named collections, as well as those found in the host institutions' general catalogues. With records of texts dating from the sixteenth century up to 2014, the catalogue includes titles in over ninety languages, including English, Irish, French, German, Italian, Latin, Ancient Greek, Spanish, as well as other European languages. The database section that highlights a significant number of texts of interest from these libraries and provides further detailed descriptions of these texts and images from them. The project is a turning point for children's literature research in Ireland. It aims to contribute to the continuing development of the strong Irish profile in children's literature research by providing a new architecture through which scholars, educators and students, both national and international, might engage with these collections.
• Funding Agency
  • Irish Research Council
• Date From
  • 02/12/13
• Date To
  • 01/12/15

• Title
  • The LA-TRAC Project
• Summary
  • The LA"TRAC project is a collaboration between the Ark, a Cultural Centre for Children, and the School of English and seeks to establish a Living Archive for Teachers, Researchers, Artists, and Children. Guided by principles of equality, diversity, and inclusion as well as Article 31 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), the research project breaks new ground and asks " how do we go about creating living cultural archives for, about, and with children?
• Funding Agency
  • Trinity Research Boost Programme
• Date From
  • 1/07/24
• Date To
  • 31/06/25

• Title
  • Reading Rooms: Fostering Constructive and Inclusive Dialogue Between Communities
• Summary
  • This inter-disciplinary project sought to investigate and advance the potential of shared reading groups to promote purposeful and meaningful dialogue among Northern Ireland interface communities. Trinity College Dublin partnered with Verbal, a voluntary organisation with nearly 30 years" experience working to improve cross-community relations in Northern Ireland. The project aimed to design a new framework and identify suitable literary texts for cross-community groups; conduct a pilot shared reading group; seek feedback from participants on group processes in relation to health and well-being, literary texts, and shared futures; and present findings in a report.
• Funding Agency
  • Irish Research Council/ Dept of Taoiseach
• Date From
  • 01/12/2021
• Date To
  • 31/09/2022

• Title
  • Discourses on Sexual Responsibility, Fatherhood and Masculinity Among Young Men from Lower Socio-Economic Groups'
• Summary
  • his research set out to explore sexual responsibility, experiences of fatherhood and constructions of masculinity among young men aged 17 to 25 years from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds in Ireland. The study was conducted against a backdrop of research that documents an important social-class dimension to sexual attitudes and behaviours. Lower socio-economic status and lower levels of education have been consistently associated with various indicators of risky sexual behaviour. Closely related to men"s sexual experiences is the possibility for men of becoming a father. Little research in Ireland has examined young men"s constructions of fatherhood, the influences on these constructions, or how men make the transition to fatherhood, especially following an unplanned pregnancy. This study seeks to address this gap.
• Funding Agency
  • Crisis Pregnancy Agency
• Date From
  • 2007
• Date To
  • 2008

• Title
  • Storytelling, Islands, and Identities: Ireland and Hawai"i, 1924-2024
• Summary
  • As a Fulbright Scholar, I explored the relationship between Ireland and Hawai"i in terms of storytelling, islands, and identities in children"s literature. I travelled to Hawai"i to mark the centenary of the publication of Padraic Colum"s collection of Hawaiian myths `At the Gateways of the Day" (1924) and spent time in the archives, analysing the complexities and controversies behind this publication.
• Funding Agency
  • Flubright
• Date From
  • 13/01/24
• Date To
  • 18/04/24