Research: Current

Funded by an European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant, the Expanding Agency: Women, Race, and the Global Dissemination of Modern Architecture project is led by Professor Kathleen James-Chakraborty.

This five-year project examines the role that women and ethnic minorities, including African Americans, had in the global dissemination of modern architecture and design between 1920 and 1970. It includes considerations of entrepreneurship, journalism, patronage, and philanthropy as pathways through which they exerted influence. Read more >>>>

Funded by an Irish Research Council (IRC) Coalesce Grant the Balancing Heritage and Sustainability in the Retrofit of Postwar Curtain Wall Highrises project is led by Professor Kathleen James-Chakraborty (University College Dublin) and Professor Biswajit Basu (Trinity College Dublin).

From the end of World War II until the energy crisis of 1973, curtain wall highrises were built across much of Europe with very little concern for the large amounts of energy that would be required to heat – and more often cool – them. The project addresses their retrofitting. Read more >>>>

Building Capacity for the Cultural Industries: Towards a Shared-Island Approach responds to the precarity of the Irish cultural industries recently underlined by Brexit and the global pandemic through championing and strengthening the shared island ecology of the professional performing arts industry. This project is led by Dr Victoria Durrer, UCD School of Art History and Cultural Policy, working in collaboration with Queen's University Belfast, Arts Council Northern Ireland, Irish Theatre Institute, Theatre and Dance NI and Cavan County Council Arts Office. It is funded by the Irish Research Council (IRC) through the New Foundations, Shared Island Initiative Strand, supported by the Shared Island Unit. Read more >>>>

Funded by the Irish Research Council (IRC) and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK (AHRC), the Premodern Digital Cultural Heritage project is led by Dr Sean Leatherbury and Professor Bryan Ward-Perkins (Oxford University).

Growing numbers of digital archive projects are engaging with cultural heritage issues, from digitising historic photos of archaeological sites in regions in conflict, to recording data on sites under threat from climate change, to connecting objects to the regions and sites from which they came. However, often these projects do not communicate with each other as best they could, leading to a duplication of efforts. Additionally, projects have been focused so far on academic audiences rather than on other groups of users, even though they are useful and important resources for museum and cultural heritage professionals, students, and other groups. The Premodern Digital Cultural Heritage research network aims to address both of these issues by promoting collaboration between open-access (i.e. freely accessible) digital projects based in the UK and in Ireland that focus on ancient and medieval cultural heritage, including art, architecture, and archaeology. . Read more >>>>

Dr Victoria Durrer is co-investigator on the Art for Reconciliation (AfR) project, which is led by Peter Shirlow at the University of Liverpool with colleagues Peter Campbell (University of Liverpool), David Grant and Des O'Rawe (Queen's University Belfast) and Matt Jennings (Ulster University). Art for Reconciliation (AfR) has developed within a growing field of arts practitioners, funders, community activists, educationalists and researchers who have used various art forms as methods of peace-building when responding to political conflict. Read more >>>>