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 the Museum of Literature Ireland – watch back here.

In December, I was elected Fellow of the Royal Historical Society – a great honour, particularly as my research work over the past several years has been mostly done independently.

I wrote a review of Seosamh Mac Grianna, This Road of Mine, translated by Mícheál Ó hAodha (The Lilliput Press) for Irish Historical Studies.

I contributed to Birth and the Irish: A Miscellany, edited by Salvador Ryan (Wordwell) with a short essay on “A Mother’s Advice to her Pregnant Daughter, 1813.”

My biography of Eleanor Cavanagh (fl. 1803–8), lady’s maid and correspondent, was published in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

The second volume in the Irish Historic Towns Atlas ‘Dublin Suburbs’ series, of which I am editor, was published. Irish Historic Towns Atlas: Dublin Suburbs No. 2: Rathmines, by Séamas Ó Maitiú is available from the Royal Irish Academy.

I gave online presentations on the history of women in the Irish Civil and Public Services and on a Derry merchant’s memoir of transatlantic travel in 1830.

I worked with the Irish Historic Towns Atlas’s successful application for a Donegal Culture and Creativity Grant. The funding paid a research assistant to advance work on the Ballyshannon volume of the Irish Historic Towns Atlas. Read more about the research here.