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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…
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A Derry Merchant’s Memoir, 1830s
While doing some other research in Library and Archives Canada some years ago, I came across a reference in the catalogue to an anonymous diary describing a journey from Derry to Canada in 1830. Intrigued, I took a copy of the manuscript and filed it away for later. But the author’s anonymity bothered me, as…
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Sarah Curran’s Previously Unknown Poetry
Sometimes, research leads to unexpected places. My 20-year obsession with the nineteenth-century travellers and diarists Martha and Katherine Wilmot has introduced me to some fascinating Irish, English and Russian women of the era. Women like Princess Dashkova, friend and confidante of Catherine the Great, first woman president of a learned academy (Russian Academy, 1783), and…
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Russia’s invasion of Ukraine
As a historian researching Irish connections with Russia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, who has visited Russia many times in connection with my research, I am horrified by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. I express my solidarity with the people of Ukraine, who have a right to self-determination, democracy and peace. I also stand with…
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The 2021 round-up
My biggest cause for celebration this year (apart from the birth of my son!) was the publication of my third book, a collection I co-edited with Ragnar Deeney Almqvist and Helena Nolan: All Strangers Here: 100 Years of Personal Writing from the Irish Foreign Service (Arlen House). We celebrated with a virtual launch hosted at…
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An Post special issue: The Irish Abroad stamp collection
An Post (the Irish postal service) launched a special collection of five stamps to pay tribute to the Irish abroad, on 27 February 2020. I was honoured to be part of the committee brought together by An Post to contribute to the ideation process. We wanted to acknowledge the diversity within the Irish diaspora over…
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Science is for Girls: A Pioneering Computer Programmer to Inspire the Next Generation of Women in Science
This piece first appeared in the “Women’s Lives” series in the Donegal Democrat, 8 Feb. 2018. The International Day of Women and Girls in Science is on 11 February. The day was established by the UN General Assembly in 2015, with the aim of achieving gender equality in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). This…
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Celebrating 100 Years of Women’s Suffrage
This piece originally appeared in the Donegal Democrat newspaper’s “Women’s Lives” column on 1 Feb. 2018 This is the first in a series of pieces on women’s history to appear in the ‘Women’s Lives’ column throughout 2018. I hope that it will raise awareness of the richness of the lives of Donegal women in the…
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Befriending Byron and Poaching Antiquities: John Lee in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1810–1815
Who spends five years travelling in the Mediterranean and Middle East, hangs out with Byron in Athens, and gets in trouble for poaching Greco-Roman antiquities? A Cambridge maths graduate called John Lee, that’s who. This post looks at some key moments in Lee’s five-year tour of the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East in 1810–1815. He…