Trinity Long Room Hub Visiting Research Fellowships

Our Fellowship Programme brings leading international scholars to the institute for periods between four weeks and six months. During this period fellows progress their major, career changing research projects, work with the unique collections of our world class Library (since 1800 one of four copyright libraries in the UK and Ireland) and engage intensely with colleagues from cognate areas within the university on collaborative research. This is a competitive programme and a new call for applications for 2014-5 fellowships will be issued later in 2013.

CURRENT VISITING RESEARCH FELLOWS

Dr Polly Ha, University of East Anglia, exploring manuscripts in Trinity College Library which were the 'hidden' archive of the second Provost 1594-8 and are revealing a new trajectory for the development of Puritanism

The Trinity Long Room Hub is delighted to welcome Dr Polly Ha back this summer for the second term of her Visiting Research Fellowship.

Dr Ha is currently working on a critical edition of manuscripts on Pre-Revolutionary Puritanism for Oxford University Press on religious independence and on Puritan plots in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Puritans were zealous Protestant activists who emerged as some of the most radical thinkers in post Reformation England.  From their first appearance, Puritans were suspected of political sedition. This suspicion was later confirmed to some minds by those Puritans who opposed the crown during the English civil wars. The official suppression of leading Puritans from the 1590s was followed by nearly a half century of silence until their public resurgence in the mid-seventeenth century.

As part of her Trinity Long Room Hub Fellowship, Dr Ha is exploring hitherto unrecognized and unpublished manuscripts in the Trinity College Library which are revealing an entirely new trajectory for the development of Puritanism.  The manuscripts themselves represent the 'hidden' archive of Walter Travers, the second Provost of Trinity College Dublin and a leading Elizabethan Puritan ideologue.  Some of these manuscripts are actually written in cipher and reveal Travers’s covert operations and connections to the heart of the English government.  They also provide a point of access to underground debates among Puritans following their suppression by the English crown.  This provides new insight into the transformation of Puritan identity well before the revolutionary circumstances of the seventeenth century.  For these clandestine debates reveal the birth of radical claims to religious independence several decades before the concept was supposed to have existed. Religious independence had a crucial impact in the early modern period with implications well beyond the seventeenth century.

Polly Ha is currently a Lecturer in Early Modern British History at the University of East Anglia.  She studied history at Yale University and the University of Cambridge and is the author of English Presbyterianism, 1590-1640 (Stanford University Press) and co-editor with Patrick Collinson of The Reception of European Reformation in Britain (Oxford University Press). 

Dr James McConnel, University of Northumbria, researching ‘The Irish First World War Songbook’

The Trinity Long Room Hub is also delighted to welcome Dr James McConnel from the University of Northumbria this summer.

Dr McConnel is a Transnational Access Fellow whose fellowship was funded by the CENDARI project (Collaborative European Digital Archive Infrastructure). CENDARI is a 4-year, European Commission-funded project led by Trinity College Dublin, in partnership with 13 institutions across 7 countries, to facilitate access to archives and resources related to medieval and modern European history for the benefit of researchers everywhere.

Focusing on the First World War, Dr McConnel’s research on the Irish Songbook for this period aims to employ digital humanities methodologies to extract data from a range of existing corpora of Irish Great War songs. The project will address key research questions such as:

• Did a distinctively Irish song repertoire develop in wartime Ireland?
• How context specific was wartime singing?
• To what extent was wartime singing subject to regional and temporal fluctuations?
• Can such songs be mapped as cultural markers of pro- and anti-war Irish sentiment?
• To what extent did songs articulate evolving concepts of ‘Irish’ and ‘British’ identity?

Dr McConnel will return to the Trinity Long Room Hub to deliver a public lecture on his research findings later this year.

James McConnel is Head of History in Northumbria University in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK. He studied at the universities of Sheffield and Durham. After he completed his doctorate in 2002, he worked on an ESRC-sponsored project examining the history of Welsh devolution before joining the University of Ulster as a postdoctoral researcher in 2005. In 2006 he was appointed Lecturer in History at Ulster, joining Northumbria University in November 2008.

The Transnational Access programme is financed by the European Union under the Seventh Framework Programme for Research (FP7). The CENDARI Transnational Access Research Fellowships are intended to support and stimulate historical research in the two pilot areas of medieval European culture and the First World War, by facilitating access to key archives, specialist knowledge and collections in CENDARI host institutions.

Funding Bodies