UCD School of Art History and Cultural Policy Scoil Stair na hEalaíne agus an Pholasaí Chultúrtha UCD

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 >>>>

Funded by UCD Humanities Institute Research Projects 2017-2020, this project is lead by Dr Emily Mark-FitzGerald and Dr Emilie Pine (UCD School of English, Drama and Film).

Media, Encounter Witness: Troubling Pasts project will be a broad consideration of the aesthetic, political and ethical issues of ‘seeing’ and mediality. Our definition of ‘media’ of witness includes photography, cinema, television, visual art, theatre, digital texts, printed texts, material culture, spectacle, and the body in performance. We begin from the proposition that cultural meaning cannot be understood as separate from forms of production. The technological, aesthetic, and social dimensions of such productions are at the centre of this series’ investigations into how ‘witnessing’ is mediated and enacted. Read more >>>

Funded by UCD Humanities Institute Research Projects 2017-2020, this project is lead by Prof Kathleen James-Chakraborty and Prof Douglas Smith (UCD School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics).

This research project aims to question some of the ways in which relations between mainstream Western and supposedly peripheral cultures have been dominated by a one-way model of innovation and exportation, flowing irreversibly from Western Europe and North America outwards towards other regions. The main focus is an alternative reading of the history of modern architecture in its relationship not to the ‘core’ Western nations in which it initially developed but rather to the ‘outlying’ regions (such as Scandinavia, South Asia and South America) that protected and promoted an international style when it fell out of favour at ‘home’. Read more >>>

Philip Cottrell is involved in a collaborative project with the National Portrait Gallery, London which involves the creation of an online database devoted to an unpublished survey of over 200 British art collections carried out by Sir George Scharf in 1856/ 7. This arose from Scharf's stewardship of the largest exhibition of European art ever staged, the 1857 Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition - a watershed event of considerable interest for scholars of British and Irish collecting and art historians generally. Read more >>>