Current projects
The purpose of this project is to find out more about the provenance of sheets with a border decoration corresponding to the famous Belles Heures in The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. These illuminated leaves will be analysed using digital reconstruction and art historical analysis. In addition, innovative technology of DNA and protein analysis will be used to learn about the parchment.
Heritages of Hunger is a research project whose aim is to research European famines legacies continue to impact debates about economic decline, refugees and Brexit. They are re-evoked to stress transnational conflict but actually offer the potential to promote mutual understanding.
The research project Redefining the Region aims to examine these unexplored transnational dimensions of local colour, by studying media representations of regions and local colour fiction from the long 19th century in European and transatlantic frameworks.
This project examines the transnational dimensions of the region in European illustrated periodicals from 1842 until 1900. Illustrated periodicals will be treated, not just as carriers, but as active agents in processes of affect and meaning-making. In doing so, this project aims to provide insight into the ways in which regions at home and elsewhere in Europe featured in the periodical press, and, additionally, how visual and textual materials on the region circulated (in reprint) through this mass medium.
This research project approaches nineteenth-century Dutch local colour fiction from a transnational perspective, considering its circulation and reception across borders and its reflection on transnational relationships and interactions in the contemporary region. It studies the contemporary discourse surrounding regionalism in fiction, and focuses on themes such as travel and tourism, language and translation, economic exchange, and the role of religion.
The Gaelic Revival was a cultural movement which focused on indigenous folklore, oral traditions and mythology as the roots of an authentic Irish identity, thereby informing political nationalism. The Irish region and its literatures and cultures was central to nationalist ideologies, but the question arises in what respects local colour fiction of this era breaks away from this national frame to address transnational concerns and issues. This research question will be central to this project, and examined in relation to short stories (published in periodicals in Ireland) and short story collections; book design and used illustrations will also be analysed. Furthermore, this project examines the circulation and reception of Irish local colour short stories from this period in Europe and the US and Canada.
The project European Local Colour Fiction in Transnational Contexts, 1830-1914 explores the trajectories of travel and translation of a selection of British, Irish, French, and Italian “regional” or “local-colour” texts, analysing nineteenth-century transnational networks and institutions that facilitated their circulation and reception. The project looks at these texts’ translation history, reviews in European periodicals, and engagement with wider European trends in fiction such as the multifaceted social realism (e.g., condition-of-England novels, French Naturalisme, and Italian Verismo).
To develop a better understanding of the role of regionalism in the formation and marketisation of diasporic identities, this subproject considers two ways in which German and Irish regions featured in the North American literary marketplace. First, it will examine the circulation of regionalist nonfiction, illustrations, and local colour fiction in a range of prominent German and Irish North American periodicals. Additionally, it will investigate the ways in which Irish and German regions were conceptualised in material written in the US and Canada.