Caroline McGee

BA Mod (TCD)

Gothic Past Website Project Manager
Research Assistant - Reconstructions of the Gothic Past (IRCHSS )
Provost’s House Stables
Irish Art Research Centre
Dept. of the History of Art,
Trinity College,
Dublin 2

E-mail: mcgeecm@tcd.ie

Memberships

• Irish Georgian Society
• Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland (Member of Council)
• Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain
• Society for the Study of Nineteenth Century Ireland

Research Interests:

• Nineteenth & twentieth century art and architecture
• Digital humanities for research, teaching and collections management

Current Role:

I recently completed working on the Reconstructions of the Gothic Past project and am now managing the project website, Gothic Past. This site was created in collaboration with staff from the Trinity College Library and the developers of Omeka, an open-source software platform from the Roy Rosenzweig Center for New Media and History (external), George Mason University, Fairfax, Va. The site is a visual archive of Irish medieval architecture and sculpture that showcases photographs and drawings from collections held in the archives of TRIARC, the Irish Art Research Centre. The site allows researchers, educators and the general public to engage with new technology for exploring Ireland's cultural heritage. It illustrates the fundamental importance of the discipline of Digital Humanities, one of the key pillars in Trinity College's research strategy. The project and the website received funding from the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences (IRCHSS) and the Irish Heritage Council.

My doctoral research project, Building Catholic Ireland, commenced in September 2011. This study, which spans themes of Irish social, economic, architectural and religious history between 1850 and 1914, investigates the business of church construction projects by the Irish Catholic Church during the period.

Awards

2011 - 2014 - Postgraduate Studentship, School of Histories and Humanities, Trinity College Dublin
2013 - Desmond Guinness Scholarship
2012 - Thomas Dammann Jr Memorial Trust Award

Selected Publications:

• Church of the Holy Cross, Charleville, Co. Cork in the ‘Building of the Month (external)’ series of the Buildings of Ireland, National Inventory of Architectural Heritage (NIAH), March 2012.
• ‘"…a noble Church in the most Catholic quarter of a bitterly Protestant and Presbyterian city." : communicating religious identity in West Belfast at the turn of the twentieth century in Belfast: the emerging city, 1850 - 1914, ed. Olwen Purdue, (Irish Academic Press: Dublin, 2012 )
• ‘Visiting 19th century artists to Ireland” in Art & Architecture of Ireland, Vol.II, ed. Nicola Figgis, (Royal Irish Academy & Yale University Press, Dublin, New Haven & London, 2014).

Selected Conferences

• ‘Building Catholic Ireland at Home and Abroad’ at the American Conference of Irish Studies, International Meeting, New Orleans, Louisiana, 14 – 17 March, 2012.
• 'Irish Elites in Nineteenth Century Munster: Constructing Catholic Charleville' at the Annual Conference of the Society for the Study of Nineteenth Century Ireland (SSNCI) Institute of Irish Studies, University of Liverpool, 30 June - 1 July, 2011
• 'The M-Factor? Medievalism and Modernity in Irish Architecture'. Presented at the interdisciplinary conference Ireland and Modernity, Institute of Irish Studies, Queen's University Belfast, 12 November 2010.
• ‘…a noble Church in the most Catholic quarter of a bitterly Protestant and Presbyterian city.’ : communicating religious identity in West Belfast at the turn of the twentieth century. Presented at the interdisciplinary conference Belfast:The Urban Experience, Institute of Irish Studies, Queen’s University, Belfast, 24 September 2010