Dear colleagues and friends,
As the academic year comes to a close, I’d like to thank you for joining us over the past months at the many conferences, meetings, talks and discussions we have hosted in the Hub.
Such events continue to provide solace in heartbreaking times, allowing us to build in-person and online connections that inspire new projects and ideas. In April, one such meeting was our annual Humanities Horizons Lecture, a fire-side chat with Secretary Lonnie Bunch, head of the renowned Smithsonian Institution. Attendees commented that they felt “uplifted by Lonnie’s vision and optimism” and inspired by his confidence in the potential of cultural institutions like that of the African American museum to transform a nation: “Nostalgia is something you do on a Saturday afternoon, but transformation is the rest of your life.”
We have continued to bring the best of our research community’s research expertise to the wider public, and since January we have hosted over 90 public events. Public engagement with research is one of the central goals of Open Research, a priority for Ireland’s research eco-system and a central tenet of a wider European research policy. We have been pleased to partner with the Royal Irish Academy on the Open Publishing initiative and to see the launch of the first national guidelines on Open Access Publishing, which will help both researchers and publishers navigate the transition to Open Access.
In other collaborations, the VOICES ERC project, led by the Department of History’s Professor Jane Ohlmeyer, was officially launched in April. It immediately captured widespread media attention, with its ambition to harness the power of AI and knowledge graph technology as research tools to recover the lost voices of non-elite women from Early Modern Ireland (including that of “dung queen” Catherine Strong, who features in this article from The Guardian). There was a similar high level of interest in a recent conference on extended reality at the Hub, with Dr Jennifer O’Meara (Film Studies) leading a provocative discussion that found its way into the Irish Times and Newstalk with questions such as: “would you meet a dead relative in Virtual Reality?”
Also in Film Studies, Dr Michael Aronson (University of Oregon) joined us as a visiting research fellow for a project to create an open data map tracing the first thirty years of Ireland’s cinemas. Through our partner schools, we also hosted Dr Tania Canas (University of Melbourne) and learned about her community-led practice-as-research approaches among communities that have been forcefully displaced. Professor Laura Izarra (Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil) continued work on her project ‘Decolonizing the Irish Revolution in South America’, and during his fellowship socio-linguist Dr Bassey Edem Antia (University of the Western Cape, South Africa) examined the decolonizing of the curriculum in South Africa. We were also honoured to be joined by our Rooney Writer in Residence, Paul Murray, and policy fellow, Dr Martin Clancy.
Grassroots research across the Arts and Humanities, meanwhile, is thriving. This semester we announced Research Incentive Scheme funding of over €30K for 8 new academic projects, and our early career researchers have continued to impress us with their ground-breaking presentations at our weekly coffee mornings. You can browse their research posters and expert commentary pieces in the newsletter below.
Last but not least, the early autumn will see our second annual Arts and Humanities Research Festival, which proved so popular last year. You don’t want to miss it so please save the date: 23-27 September.
Until then, on behalf of the Hub team, I wish you all a restful break before the start of the next academic year.
Eve Patten, Director
Read the full newsletter here: https://bit.ly/TLRHNewsletter2024