ECIS Postgrad Bursaries 2023: Martin McMahon

Image showing photo of Martin McMahon

Martin McMahon is completing an MA in Irish History at University College Dublin. His research explores the impact of the military on Irish urbanisation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He will be speaking about his research at the ECIS Annual Conference on 16-17 June 2023. You can follow him on Twitter @MartinMc1404

Favourite archive:
Many archives like the British Library, TNA in Kew and the Dublin’s National Archives are purpose built, state of the art facilities. However, my favourite has to be Marsh’s Library, where the building itself, its interior and environment are an integral part of the archive. This is no better place to contemplate ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’, in such a wonderful surrounding.

Favourite museum, gallery or heritage site:
I can be found every Sunday morning in the Hugh Lane Gallery on Dublin’s Parnell Square, where the gallery hosts an eclectic blend of classical music – from the seventeenth century to contemporary. Located in the 1st Earl of Charlemont’s mansion, in the midst of eighteenth century architecture and modern art, there is no better way to spend a Sunday morning.     

Most exciting place or time in the eighteenth-century:
Dublin, 1740-1760.

Best online resource:
It’s hard not to think of ECCO as the first port of call.

Best book of 18th century interest:
Anthony Malcomson’s Nathaniel Clements (1705-77): Politics, fashion and architecture in mid-eighteenth century Ireland.

What eighteenth century figure would you most like to have a drink with?
James Butler, 2nd Duke of Ormonde.

What will you be talking about at the ECIS Annual Conference?
I’ve spent the last two years researching the Dublin Barracks, the precursor to Collins Barracks. At the time, a unique and innovative facility, it was reputedly capable of accommodating up to 4,000 people.  Built at a time of great political and financial pressures within the Irish Establishment, my paper focuses on how these pressures effected the approach of Thomas Burgh, the Surveyor-General, and discusses how this might have impacted on his legacy as one of the country’s first Irish architects.

ECIS Postgrad Bursaries 2023: Luke Murphy

Luke Murphy is a PhD candidate at Dundalk Institute of Technology. His research focuses on the history of cartography and landed estates in the region of north County Louth. He is particularly interested in why estate maps and surveys were being commissioned at certain moments in time, their uses in estate management and how estate cartography both captured, and contributed to, changes taking place on landed estates during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He will be speaking about his research at the ECIS Annual Conference on 16-17 June 2023. You can follow him on Twitter @LukeMurphy16.

Favourite archive:
I would have to go with Louth County Archives. Sitting in a nineteenth-century jail makes research that bit more atmospheric.

Favourite museum, gallery or heritage site:
I love an open-air museum so the Ulster Folk Museum in Cultra is up there. Also, the Dublin Writers Museum and the National Gallery of Ireland.     

Most exciting place or time in the eighteenth-century:
For cartography it has to be Dublin in the 1750s with the arrival of the French school of land surveyors.

Best online resource:
The Longfield Map Collection (NLI) and the Irish Historic Towns Atlas.

Best book of 18th century interest:
John Andrews Plantation Acres, a book that should most definitely be reprinted!

What eighteenth century figure would you most like to have a drink with?
I’m obliged to say John Rocque, but outside of my research, Henry Joy McCracken.

What will you be talking about at the ECIS Annual Conference?
With the consolidation of landed estates at the beginning of the eighteenth century and the changing social, political and economic landscape, there came an increasing importance placed on accurate property boundaries. Landlords and agents were interested in who held land, its location, and the quality and quantity of their holdings. This resulted in a demand for maps that developed into a new genre of cartography. Estate mapping became a competitive private enterprise with an expanding market and a growing profession of land surveying which boomed from the 1750s onwards.

Based on a corpus of over 90 manuscript estate maps documented as part of ongoing PhD research, my paper will look at the role of estate cartography in estate management, focusing on the eighteenth-century Anglesey, Fortescue and Tipping estates in north County Louth. Furthermore, I will discuss the regional importance of north Louth and the estate landscape that emerged from the events of the seventeenth century. Due to the very nature of these maps, there is a need to delve deeper into ancillary sources, namely the material found in estate archives, which reveal why maps were being made and what they capture at certain moments in the history of the estates. By taking these alternative routes to contextualise and understand estate maps, this consequentially allows us to investigate maps as tools in estate management, and tap into the lived experience of the region’s strata of inhabitants.

Literary Landscape of Ireland Storymap

Literary landscape

Michelle from Ard na Sidhe Country House, in Co. Kerry has put together an interactive StoryMap called ‘A Literary Landscape of Ireland’ to celebrate all of Ireland’s most prolific writers and poets.

This StoryMap highlights many of the places that inspired the writers and poets involved, as well as the locations where the writers grew up and attended school.

The entry on Jonathan Swift might be of particular interest to ECIS blog readers.

Follow this link to view the Literary Landscape of Ireland StoryMap in a new window.

ASECS Prize Winners 2015

Many congratulations to the Eighteenth-Century Ireland Society members who have been awarded prizes by the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies this year!

  • The ASECS 2014-15 Editing and Translation Fellowship award of $1,000 went to Aileen Douglas, Associate Professor of Irish literature and Director of Research at Trinity College in Dublin. She will use the prize money for travel to the Newbery Library in Chicago to work on a scholarly edition of Elizabeth Sheridan’s novel The Fairy Ring, or Emeline, A Moral Tale, first published in Dublin in 1780 and then in London in 1783. Novelist and diarist Elizabeth Sheridan was the youngest of four siblings, all of whom would, as adults, achieve varying degrees of success as writers, particularly her older brother, the dramatist Richard Brinsley Sheridan.
  • The A. C. Elias, Jr. Irish-American Research Travel Fellowship was awarded to Michael J. Griffin, University of Limerick and David O’Shaughnessy, Trinity College.
  • Finally, the Hans Turley Prize in Queer Eighteenth-Century Studies was awarded to Declan Kavanagh for his project ‘”A Motel Figure, of the Fribble Tribe”: Charles Churchill’s Poetry and the Racialization of Effeminate Discourses’.

 

 

Pickering & Chatto Sale Opens Today

sale

Pickering and Chatto have kindly informed us that they are having a sale! 40 of their major works are now available at a discount of 40%. The sale just opened and ends on Monday, 23 February 2015.

The following titles are available while stocks last:

Website Launch: Mapping State and Society in Eighteenth-Century Ireland

Collins barracks

‘Mapping State and Society in Eighteenth-Century Ireland’ is a new free online resource currently under development at UCD. The project aims to provide a free electronic platform for research projects that are using spatial and other data in order to create online maps and further data relating to state and society Continue reading Website Launch: Mapping State and Society in Eighteenth-Century Ireland

The Georgian Pop Up Museum in Limerick

What was the Georgian Pop Up Museum? It was a locally produced, volunteer led and run project showcasing Limericks rich Georgian history and built heritage in one of Limericks oldest buildings (c. 1770). The project was designed, conceived and run by Dr Ursula Callaghan, Historian and Cáit Ní Cheallacháin, Conservation Architect, Continue reading The Georgian Pop Up Museum in Limerick

Member Profiles: Amy Prendergast

Amy Prendergast

Amy Prendergast is a committee member of the Eighteenth-Century Ireland Society and an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at Trinity College Dublin. Amy’s research interests include literary history and associational life, and she is currently working on her first monograph which will look at literary salons in France, Britain and Ireland.  Continue reading Member Profiles: Amy Prendergast

Member Profiles: Andrew Carpenter

Capture

Andrew Carpenter is a committee member of the Eighteenth-Century Ireland Society. He was the founding president of the society and founding editor of the society’s journal, Eighteenth-Century Ireland / Iris an dá chultúr. He is Emeritus Professor of English at University College Dublin. His research interests include Irish poetry in English, 1660-1800, Continue reading Member Profiles: Andrew Carpenter

Member Profiles: Robert Mahony

Bob face June 13Robert Mahony has been a member of the Eighteenth-Century Ireland Society (intermittently) since 1986. He was Professor of English at the Catholic University of America and is now retired. His research focus is Jonathan Swift.

Favourite archive:
Mainly archives in Dublin or London, sometimes the Library of Congress and the Folger Library, Washington.

Favourite Continue reading Member Profiles: Robert Mahony

New Books: Patrick Walsh, The South Sea Bubble and Ireland: Money, Banking and Investment, 1690-1721

pwnb

The image on the cover of my new book reproduces the Ten of Clubs from a famous set of playing cards produced in London in the aftermath of the South Sea Bubble, the famous stock market crash of 1720. Each card in the deck depicted a different group of investors in Continue reading New Books: Patrick Walsh, The South Sea Bubble and Ireland: Money, Banking and Investment, 1690-1721

Member Profiles: Patrick Walsh

Dr Patrick WalshPatrick Walsh is Reviews Editor of Eighteenth-Century Ireland/Iris an dá chultúr and an Irish Research Council CARA Postdoctoral Research Fellow based at the School of History and Archives, UCD. His research looks at Irish economic, social and political history in the long eighteenth century. He is currently writing a book on Continue reading Member Profiles: Patrick Walsh

Member Profiles: Joe Lines

Joe Lines

Joe Lines is a PhD student at Queen’s University Belfast. His research looks at Irish fiction from 1660-1790. Joe is a member of the Eighteenth-Century Ireland Society and will be speaking at the 2014 Annual Conference in Armagh.  

Favourite museum, gallery or heritage site:
Shandy Hall, North Yorkshire

Most exciting place or time in Continue reading Member Profiles: Joe Lines

Member Profiles: Heather McKendry

Heather McKendryHeather McKendry is a PhD candidate at McMaster University. Her research interests include Restoration and eighteenth-century literature, prostitute narratives, representations of epidemics and venereal disease, economic history and crime writing. Heather is a new member of the Eighteenth-Century Ireland Society and will be speaking at the 2014 Annual Conference in Armagh.  Continue reading Member Profiles: Heather McKendry

New Books: Intellectual Journeys

Details below on a recent volume, Intellectual Journeys: The Translation of ideas in Enlightenment England, France and Ireland edited by Lise Andries, Frédéric Ogée, John Dunkley and Darach Sanfey. The papers included in the volume are drawn from three conferences on that theme organised respectively by the French, British and Irish Continue reading New Books: Intellectual Journeys

New Books: The Irish Poet and the Natural World

Prof. Andrew Carpenter writes:

The Irish Poet and the Natural World: an anthology of verse in English from the Tudors to the Romantics. Edited by Andrew Carpenter and Lucy Collins. Cork University Press.

This annotated anthology of poems makes available a rich variety of Irish texts depicting the relationship between humans and the Continue reading New Books: The Irish Poet and the Natural World

Member Profiles: Eoin Magennis

Eoin Magennis is President of the Eighteenth-Century Ireland Society and Economist and Policy Research Manager in InterTradeIreland, the cross-border trade and business development body. His research focuses on Ireland of the ‘short’ mid-eighteenth century, 1725-1785 and its politics, economy, improvement and protests. For further information see his webpage, https://independent.academia.edu/eoinmagennis.

Favourite archive:
The Armagh Continue reading Member Profiles: Eoin Magennis