Research: Current

Dance Connects is a project supporting interrelations between people and place through dance. Building a sustainable cross-border exchange, the project responds to the unique dance ecology of rural, cross-border areas and employs an innovative creative engagement approach combining dance practice-as-research and social science. Dance Connects encompasses a series of dance sharing events, a touring exhibition, public engagement activities, a podcast series, and the development of cross-border dance facilitator and venue databases. The project is funded by Creative Ireland’s Creative Communities on a Shared Island scheme (2023-2027) and partners local authorities of Cavan, Monaghan, and Fermanagh-Omagh with practitioners of diverse dance communities, and with researchers Professor Aoife McGrath (Queen’s University Belfast) and Dr Victoria Durrer (University College Dublin). Read More >>>

Funded by a Marie Skłodowska-Curie (MSCA) Postdoctoral Fellowship, Visualising Hibernia examines the relationship between visual representations of Hibernia, the female personification of Ireland, and diverse political, cultural, and religious identities in Ireland during the period c.1770-c.1930. Read more >>>

Funded by UCD’s Earth Institute through the Strategic Priority Support Mechanism, the Rural Pact Ireland Framework project will develop a national framework for Ireland’s engagement with the European Rural Pact. Aligning Irish rural development with the EU’s Long-Term Vision for Rural Areas, the project will map existing policies, engage stakeholders, and outline governance, collaboration mechanisms, and priority themes. Working with the Rural Pact Support Office in Brussels, it will produce a final report with recommendations for implementation and future research.
The team is led by Karen Keaveney, with Orla Murphy, Victoria Durrer, Orla Leyden, Adwoa Ofori, and Gabriel O’Connell.  Read More >>>

Funded by an European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant, the (opens in a new window)Expanding Agency: Women, Race, and the Global Dissemination of Modern Architecture project is led by Professor Kathleen James-Chakraborty.

This five-year project examines the role that women and ethnic minorities, including African Americans, had in the global dissemination of modern architecture and design between 1920 and 1970. It includes considerations of entrepreneurship, journalism, patronage, and philanthropy as pathways through which they exerted influence. Read more >>>>

Funded by the Irish Research Council (IRC) and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK (AHRC), the Premodern Digital Cultural Heritage project is led by Dr Sean Leatherbury and Professor Bryan Ward-Perkins (Oxford University).

Growing numbers of digital archive projects are engaging with cultural heritage issues, from digitising historic photos of archaeological sites in regions in conflict, to recording data on sites under threat from climate change, to connecting objects to the regions and sites from which they came. However, often these projects do not communicate with each other as best they could, leading to a duplication of efforts. Additionally, projects have been focused so far on academic audiences rather than on other groups of users, even though they are useful and important resources for museum and cultural heritage professionals, students, and other groups. The Premodern Digital Cultural Heritage research network aims to address both of these issues by promoting collaboration between open-access (i.e. freely accessible) digital projects based in the UK and in Ireland that focus on ancient and medieval cultural heritage, including art, architecture, and archaeology. . Read more >>>>