Funded PhD Studentship on the Irish Research Council’s MACMORRIS Project

Outline

The Project

The MACMORRIS project (Mapping Actors and Communities: A Model of Research in Renaissance Ireland in the 16th and 17th Centuries) is a four-year digital-humanities project funded by the Irish Research Council that seeks to map the full range of cultural activity in Ireland, across languages and ethnic groups, from roughly 1541 to 1691. It aims to provide an inclusive account of creative, scholarly, and intellectual activity in a period of conflict, change and innovation which transformed Ireland. In doing so, it will extend, unify and redefine our understanding of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Ireland, its place in the European Renaissance, and in the wider global networks of an emerging modernity.

The project has two objectives. First, it will build a dataset of every figure from or living in or closely associated with Ireland in this period. Secondly, it will use the province of Munster as a case study and, using the biographical and bibliographical data gleaned from the dataset, it will create an interactive map to identify, geo-locate, and provide biographical and bibliographical information for the totality of cultural producers working in Irish, English, and other languages in Munster between 1569 and 1607.

The Principal Investigator of the MACMORRIS project is Prof. Patricia Palmer: https://www.maynoothuniversity.ie/english/our-people/patricia-palmer The project team also includes two post-doctoral fellows and a programmer.

The PhD Researcher

The MACMORRIS Project seeks to recruit a well-qualified applicant interested in undertaking a research degree at PhD level in a way that complements the project’s objective of producing a more inclusive account of early modern Ireland. To that end, we are inviting applications from candidates interested in undertaking a focused case study that will produce a more granular sense of the period and, thereby, help to redefine it. Given the project’s focus on the province of Munster for its case study, an interest in cultural practices and interactions there would be particularly welcome. Specifically, applicants might have a research interest in one or more of the following areas:

1. Group Biography e.g. a case study of a specific community of writers/learned families/settlers;

2. Network Analysis e.g. exploring relations poets and patrons, natives and newcomers; cross-cultural knowledge exchanges (and/or conflictual encounters) between communities;

3. Irish writers in English, e.g. Richard Stanihurst.

4. English writers who campaigned and/or settled in Ireland during the Elizabethan and Jacobean period, e.g. Edmund Spenser, Barnaby Googe, Barnaby Rich, Sir John Harington;

5. Neo-Latin writing, scholarship, and translation in early modern Ireland;

6. Continental European networks; writing in and translation of European vernaculars produced in Ireland or by the Irish abroad;

7.Gaelic writing and networks of patronage;

8. Book History, manuscript circulation, and patterns of knowledge exchange within and between the communities of early modern Ireland;

9. Patterns of Settlement: given the MACMORRIS project’s commitment to mapping and geo-locating cultural producers of early modern Ireland, we would also be interested in hearing from candidates with a background in archaeology, cultural geography, or related disciplines, interested in exploring the loci and material culture of writers and other cultural producers in Munster.

The ideal candidate will have with a background in one or more of the following: early modern literature, history, archaeology, or cognate disciplines; library science, information management. Co-supervision with another department, e.g. History, Gaeilge, Classics, is possible.

The candidate should have an interest in applied digital humanities and feel comfortable working on an interdisciplinary team.

What is funded

The studentship is for 48 months and include a tax-free stipend of €16,000 p.a. and the payment of academic fees, as well as a laptop, and travel allowance.

Duration

The studentship is for 48 months.

Eligibility

All applicants must have:

• At least a 2.1 degree at BA and MA level in English, History, Gaeilge, Classics, Comparative Literature, Archaeology (or library studies/information management) with a strong scholarly grounding in Renaissance literature and early modern Ireland.

How to Apply

Please send a CV and a letter of interest that should include an approximately 500-word description of your proposed research topic to pat.palmer@mu.ie. The deadline for applications is 17.00 GMT on Monday, 6 January 2020.