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2023 in review
This was a busy year, with lots of exciting events and projects. Bear with me while I blow my trumpet just a little; I don’t think most of us stop and take stock of our successes nearly often enough. The biggest achievement of the year was the launch of the exhibition I co-curated for the…
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The First Scientific Investigation of a Bog Body, 1781
Bogs are curious places. They spark memories of Irish childhood summers spent footing and saving turf amid swarms of midges. They inspire awe and alarm as nature’s own carbon-capture technology, but rapidly disappearing. For others, bogs are political landscapes that evoke anger, as age-old turbary rights appear threatened by the urgency of conservation. In the…
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Cynthia Longfield, Madam Dragonfly
”I find machetes so useful in the jungle, don’t you?” Cynthia Longfield, quoted in The Times, 9 July 1991 Cynthia Longfield, ‘Madam Dragonfly’, was born in London in 1896. Her home schooling there was interrupted by regular visits to her maternal grandparents’ farm in Cloyne, Co. Cork, where she enjoyed roaming the countryside. Her early love of…
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The Nineteenth-Century ‘Wedding Tour’
A wood fire, a heap of congratulatory letters, and the smiles of her who every day ncreases [sic] my dependence on her love, made our breakfast table delightful – Charles Sneyd Edgeworth, 5 Sept 1813 The post-wedding holiday that we now call a ‘honeymoon’ emerged in the late eighteenth century, when couples from the European…
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New exhibition: Ireland and the Birth of Europe
Ireland and the Birth of Europe, an exhibition I co-curated for the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs with Dr Damian Bracken of University College Cork, was launched by Tánaiste Micheál Martin TD in Cork on 28 April. The exhibition is part of the Department of Foreign Affairs cultural programme to mark fifty years of Ireland’s…
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Scientific Travels in Nineteenth-Century Donegal
Donegal welcomed some notable scientific travellers in the nineteenth century. They were drawn to the region principally because it was, in the words of one of the era’s most celebrated scientists, Humphry Davy, ‘in many respects peculiar and out of the track of ordinary tourists.’[1] These people were attracted by what they saw as the…
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Mending her health: Irish Women in Eighteenth-Century Spa
The small mountain town of Spa in present-day Belgium had been well-known for its mineral springs from the sixteenth century, but its popularity with visitors soared in the eighteenth century. The town grew, and developed amenities like the Parc de Sept Heures, assembly rooms and a casino. It attracted the wealthiest families in Europe, as…
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Catharine Parr Traill, Author of Natural Histories for Children
Catharine Parr Traill (1802-1899) was a prolific author who published children’s books, emigrants’ guides, and popular natural histories. Under the name Catharine Parr Strickland, she published at least 15 moral tales and natural histories for children between 1818 and 1831. Catherine had a great deal of knowledge about natural history, and in her books she…
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Celebrating International Women’s Day 2023
As ever, my thoughts today are with women worldwide living through displacement, war, hunger and inequality. International Women’s Day has its roots in social justice, pacifism, anti-imperialism and resistance to oppression. The date 8 March was formally adopted at the Second International Conference of Working Women in Copenhagen in 1910 as a day when women of the…
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Anna Maria Chetwood – a forgotten 19th-century Irish novelist?
Anna Maria Chetwood was the author of at least two anonymously-published novels published in the 1820s. She was also not the author of at least two anonymously-published novels published in the 1820s. Despite my efforts to confirm either one of these statements, she remains for me Schroedinger’s novelist. There are layers and chains of contradictory…