-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
Agnes Mary Clerke, an Irish Astronomer in Italy and London
Agnes Mary Clerke had no formal education and, despite the gender bar of the male-dominated professional scientific world, she became one of the most important astronomers and science writers of the Victorian period, and has a moon crater named in her honour. Hear me speak about Agnes as part of the Illuminate Herstory festival at…