2013-14
Dr James McConnel
The Trinity Long Room Hub was also delighted to welcome Dr James McConnel from the University of Northumbria as a Visiting Research Fellow.
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.
Bio
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.
Research
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?
Transnational Access Programme
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.
The Irish First World War Songbook
