Speaking about her early career, Dr Higgins grounded the discussion around her personal story having grown up in a council house in Ballymena in Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles. Alluding to the fact that her parents didn’t go to university, Dr Higgins said that “for me for a very long time education was about learning the rules; it was about trying to figure out what it was that I needed to know that all of these other people had and they understood”, adding that for her it was about “fitting in”.
From this “cautious” beginning as a historian, Dr Higgins spoke to Dr Hennessy about her journey towards her current project which came after a somewhat “long process of finding a different language” and realising that her own experience was of value. This has led her to a much more relaxed place, she explained, and to “testing the rules across disciplines” and wondering whether her own discipline of history was always “adequate”.
Dr Higgin’s current work explores sensory experiences of living through the recent conflict in Northern Ireland. In 2021-2, she received a Leverhulme Research Fellowship for her project ‘Sensing the Troubles: A Critical Re-Imaging of Life in Northern Ireland’. She is currently the recipient of an AHRC Networking Grant for ‘Towards a Socio-Somatic History of the Troubles’, which brings together scholars, arts practitioners and community organisers to explore the impact of society on the body.
“I wanted to find a different memory bank...I wanted to find those other more elusive memories.” Central to this, Dr Higgins explained, was how we experience memory with our whole body. This sensory approach to the Troubles came from this idea that it’s “with our senses that we encounter the world...through what we see, what we hear.” However, as Dr Higgins noted, historians have rarely used this method to collect information in the present and “that’s what I wanted to do.”
Professor Roisín Higgins
Dr Hennessy asked Dr Higgins about the methodological challenges of engaging in this approach for a historian, particularly on a topic as sensitive as the Troubles and using interviews rather than the more traditional written sources. “There were certain things I had to think about”, noted Dr Higgins as she explained a clear ethical process that needed to be followed and the “potential vulnerability” of people she interviewed but she said she knew that she couldn’t rely on existing archives and that she had to collect her own archive.
“Because I wanted to tell a different story, I knew I needed to find different sources.”
Roisín Higgins is an Associate Professor at Teesside University with a research focus on historical memory. Her book on the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising, Transforming 1916: Meaning, Memory and the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Easter Rising (Cork, 2012), won the ACIS James Donnelly Sr Prize for History and Social Science. Roisín was involved in many aspects of the Centenary of the Easter Rising, including acting as historical consultant on the ‘Commemoration’ zone of the permanent exhibition GPO: Witness History. Her wide-ranging public-facing work also includes the popular RTÉ programme National Treasures.
In terms of her experience of interviewing people across the political spectrum, Dr Higgins said that many people emailed her afterwards to say that they felt “lighter” but for her, the act of listening was just as powerful. “There’s no doubt it changed me. That act of listening changed me. It made me much more open.”