Belfast-Dublin 2017

Belfast-Dublin – October 2017

Outside QUB in October – beautiful campus & great weather!

For over a year Dr. Marie Coleman (Senior Lecturer, Queen’s University Belfast) and I have been working to develop a large Arts & Humanities Research Council grant to fund the launch of our joint project on compensation following the Irish Revolution. In October we met up to plan the next steps in preparation for submission.

Q.U.B. has excellent research support, and Marie and I were given dedicated space to hash out some of our ideas. We even benefited from a visit from research office staff, who helped brainstorm the articulation of certain financial sections of the application. Next, we visited the Public Record Office Northern Ireland (PRONI), to dig further into the source material that will inform this project.

As an added bonus, I was invited to address the Institute of Irish Studies seminar, where I delivered a talk entitled, “Toward an Environmental History of the Irish Revolution.” It was well-attended with great questions and will be produced as a podcast shortly (watch this space). The rest of this term’s seminars look amazing!

It was then on to Dublin, where I spent time back in the National Archives. We are particularly interested in Office of Public Works files, which detail damage to, and compensation for government buildings during the revolution. Unfortunately, much of these have yet to be cataloged and are unavailable. However, the timeline of our grant would overlap with their release. It’s always good to be back in Dublin, and I had the chance to meet up with a few friends, take some nice walks through my old stomping grounds, and rediscover the city all over again.