A new year

Well this blog has been very quiet, no action for 2014. This is not to say there was no action in 2014, more of course that there was a lot! So this is a post to start again by recapping my research and writing in 2014.

2014 was the first full year of funding for a project (funded by the Australian Research Council) on the Irish in colonial Australia that I am conducting with a colleague from the University of Melbourne, Elizabeth Malcolm. 

The title of the project is "The Irish in Colonial Australia: Race, Representation and Repression"  and its main aims are: 
 

 1.    to analyse the racialisation of the Irish in Australia between 1788 and 1914, charting their movement from an excluded group to part of the founding ‘white’ race;

 2.   to evaluate how such racialised perceptions impacted the lives of Irish immigrants who were institutionalised in colonial Australia;

             3. to analyse how the Irish interacted with other racialised groups

 So far we have had some very good research assistants work with us to collect data on Irish-born patients of Mental asylums in Sydney and Melbourne and we will be starting to collect similar sorts of data on prisoners in the NSW and Victorian colonies in the latter half of the nineteenth century. 
We have also worked on representations of the Irish visually through cartoons published in some of the major periodicals of the late ninteenth century in Australia - The Bulletin and Melbourne Punch. We published an article "Now him white man: Images of the Irish in Colonial Australia" on this analysis in History Australia in late 2014. I will post more about the cartoons another day, they really are lots of fun. 

So that is one project that has been occupying me over 2014. The other major one is the Gender and Violence project, which Elizabeth Malcolm and I have been working on for some time now. Although life - by way of changing jobs, new jobs, families expanding etc - have meant this has taken longer than we had hoped. The length of time we have spent on writing the monograph, thinking, talking and writing about our ideas has meant that the results are much better than they would have been otherwise. 

So far I have committed to writing three articles on aspects of this project in 2015 as well as continuing with the remaining chapters of the monograph. I have been able to secure support for some of this by way of fellowships, including one as Associate Investigator with the Centre for the History of Emotions, for research on the ways that violence associated with children was written about and incorporated into emotional responses to violence in 17th century Ireland. I will post more about that over the coming months as well. 

So all in all there has been much to occupy me over 2014. Now for 2015, with my full writing program.

 

Change and continuity in research

As I live in Australia and research medieval and early modern Irish history, the Research Trip always looms large in the way I think about researching and writing.

I have just returned from a month in Dublin, a precious month away from domestic and teaching responsibilities where I could read and write to my own timetable as well as catch up with friends and colleagues. In the three years since my last Research Trip a lot has changed. I have changed jobs and am now lecturing in European History at Victoria University, Melbourne, which I love. It also means I have the security (and travel funds) to plan my research more than I had been able in the previous few years. So for the past year I have been compiling long lists under the title “To check in Dublin”, working out flights, accommodation, conferences and seminars to attend.

Dublin, and Ireland, has also changed. When I was last in Dublin the crash of the Celtic Tiger was starting to be felt. This time the effects are even more evident. Reduced staff at libraries, shops with less stock, gloomy news about taxes as well as ghost estates and unfinished buildings, were all very visible.

The process of researching in the project that took me to Dublin – “Gender and violence in medieval and early modern Ireland” – is also changing through the availability of digital resources. The digital publication of the 1641 depositions (http://1641.tcd.ie), the Circle project (http://chancery.tcd.ie/), Irish Scripts Online (http://www.isos.dias.ie/‎), google books, JStor Ireland, and State Papers Online as well as others mean that so much of what I used to do on research trips I can now do from my desk in Melbourne. This is of course wonderful and I want to write more about this in a later blog. However for me there is also the joy of being able to write in a library where I can follow footnotes and ideas to hard copy published and unpublished sources immediately, as there is still a huge proportion of what I want to examine that has not been digitalised, or is difficult to read online (not all the book digitalisations are in easy to access formats). While I can access a large amount of this material in Melbourne, there are still items that are not easily available here or that need inter-library loans or travel to other university libraries. So I enjoy the luxury of having what I need under one roof – thanks National Library of Ireland! I also continue to revel in the tactile and sensory nature of the artefact of the book or manuscript. For me this is a big part of how I research and gather the energy and inspiration needed to analyse and write.

Networking too is changing, ‘meeting’ people working on related topics through twitter and academia.edu is wonderful and incredibly productive, but still, for me at least, does not totally replace meeting face to face.  Going to conferences remains important– this time I went to the Irish Conference of Historians at UCD, a really good conference – and meeting researchers working on related and unrelated topics is another pleasure, as well as necessity for researching topics at a distance.

So now I am back in wintery Melbourne with all my files and notes, ready to start the final write up for this project and begin another (on concepts of race and Irishness in nineteenth-century Australia). As well as the familiar continuities of working through research notes and writing, I will also change a little of the way I work and start this blog to share findings and insights I find through the process of finishing, starting and continuing.