Governance

Professor Karen Corrigan, School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, Newcastle University (Chair)

Karen Corrigan is Professor of Linguistics and English Language at the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, Newcastle University and Director of the Catherine Cookson Archive of Tyneside and Northumbrian Dialect. She was educated at University College Dublin, where she also held a research fellowship in 2009 at the John Hume Institute. Other research fellowships include those funded by the Leverhulme Trust as well as the British Council (BC)/Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) at the Meertens Institute in Amsterdam.

In addition to her individual research, she has also been the recipient of awards for a range of collaborative, externally funded projects. These include Working with Bilingual Children, an initiative supported by Humberside, Local Education Authority that focused on best practice in the education of bilingual children in Britain’s primary schools and resulted in a book of the same name published in 1995 by Multilingual Matters. Karen has also worked collaboratively on interdisciplinary research funded by the National Health Service which sought to use linguistic tools to more rapidly diagnose patients presenting with Borderline Personality Disorder. Recent large-scale and collaborative projects which she has also led have focused on documenting and archiving the linguistic history of dialectal English in North Eastern England, culminating in the creation of three websites where both legacy and contemporary text, sound and image files relating to these distinctive varieties can be downloaded (see http://research.ncl.ac.uk/necte/; http://research.ncl.ac.uk/decte/; http://research.ncl.ac.uk/decte/toon/). As well as numerous papers in journals and edited works, there have been two volumes entitled Creating and Digitizing Language Corpora (Palgrave, 2007) associated with these Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded projects.

The interrelationship between syntax and variation has been an enduring research interest of Karen’s since her days as a doctoral student at University College Dublin and she continues to research and publish in this field alongside her contributions to corpus linguistics. Her book with Leonie Cornips (John Benjamins, 2005) arising from their BC/NWO exchange fellowship programme entitled Syntax and Variation: Reconciling the Biological and the Social is an important landmark in the development of the recent sub-field of linguistics known as ‘Socio-Syntax’.  This research programme is closely linked to her interests in Irish-English, an area that she has published in for the last twenty years. The award of an AHRC fellowship in 2008 to conduct new fieldwork in Northern Ireland under the auspices of her The Empire Speaks Back project resulted in a monograph: Irish English, Volume 1: Northern Ireland (EUP, 2010). Karen also used this research opportunity to undertake various public engagement initiatives at local primary and secondary schools in addition to a public lecture at the Centre for Migration Studies at the Ulster-American Folk Park, Omagh (http://www.qub.ac.uk/cms/).

Ann Rigney holds the chair of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University. Her research deals primarily with the intersections between literature and historiography, and she has published widely on topics relating to narrative theory, historical representation, and cultural memory. She is author of The Rhetoric of Historical Representation: Three Narrative Histories of the French Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 1990, 2002) and Imperfect Histories: The Elusive Past and the Legacy of Romantic Historicism (Cornell University Press, 2001; winner of the John-Pierre Barricelli Award 2001).  She is co-editor (with Joep Leerssen) of Historians and Social Values (Amsterdam University Press, 2000) and (with Astrid Erll) of Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory (de Gruyter, 2009).

Together with Kiene Brillenburg Wurth she was one of the principal authors of an introduction to literary studies called Het leven van teksten (Amsterdam University Press, 2006). She directs an interdisciplinary research project on Transnational Memory, and is one of the coordinators of the Utrecht University focus area Cultures and Identities. She was elected a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) in 2005. Her most recent book The Afterlives of Walter Scott: Memory on the Move will appear with Oxford University Press in 2012.

Two questions have driven Michael Shanks' research into prehistoric Europe: "How are we to understand people and societies through the things they make and leave behind?" and "How are we to write the archaeological past on the basis of what is left behind?" These historiographic interests in documenting the presence of the past has led to a range of experimental work, including a major project with performance artist Mike Pearson (Theatre/Archaeology), defined as the rearticulation of fragments of the past as real-time event.

Shanks was the Omar and Althea Dwyer Hoskins Professor of Classical Archaeology between 2010 and 2013. He is Director of Stanford Archaeology Center's Metamedia Lab, which applies an archaeological sensibility to media new and old, and Co-Director of the Stanford Humanities Lab, a groundbreaking cross-disciplinary center of digital humanities. He received his B.A. and Ph.D. from Cambridge University, and was a lecturer at the University of Wales, Lampeter before moving to the United States in 1999 to take up a Chair in Classics at Stanford.

From 1997 to 2004, Shanks was a Company Director of Brith Gof, a leading multimedia and performance company working in Europe. Currently, one of his main projects is the Presence Project, which seeks to understand the presence of the past, the performance of presence, and the presence effect of cultural memory with sixteen of the world's foremost performance artists. Shanks has received funding to work with various artists on different projects, such as building a memory palace with artist Lynn Hershman in the virtual world Second Life.

His research interests include the history of archaeological engagements with the past, and design in Graeco-Roman antiquity. For Shanks, archaeology began, and continues, in the Roman borders of the north of England and Scotland, exploring Hadrian's Wall, the great medieval city of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and north into the heartland of Celtic Christianity and the landscapes of Walter Scott. He has also specialized in the early Greek cities in the Mediterranean, as well as early farming societies and their monuments in Wessex and Sweden – new models and stories of early agriculture, the first cities and empires, and how much the modern world has in common with antiquity. Shanks believes archaeology is a bridging field. For him, archaeologists do not discover the past; they work on what remains. Archaeology is about our relationships with what is left of the past.

Stuart is the EMEA lead for GooglersGive, Google’s employee social responsibility programme. His team supports Googlers to use their skills, talents and resources to have an extraordinary impact on themselves and the world, thus empowering Googlers to give back and engage with the community in a meaningful way through a variety of employee giving and volunteering programs.

Before joining Google, Stuart was Chief Executive of Business to Arts from 2007 to 2014. During his time with the organisation Stuart led the development of Business to Arts’ groundbreaking community partnership with Bank of America Merrill Lynch which led to the creation of the New Stream capacity building programme, resulting in over €9 million of additional private income being generated by participating arts organisations through the delivery of training and mentoring services.

Previously Stuart spent 4 years as Business Development Director with Accenture working across both the public and private sectors in Ireland. Before this he spent a number of years working for Fujitsu in the UK culminating in his appointment as Commercial Manager for a 1000-person in 1999. He moved to Ireland in 2001 to join CapGemini as Head of Outsourcing.

Stuart is the Chair of the Lewis Glucksman Gallery at UCC and is a member of the International Advisory Committee of the Humanities Institute at UCD. He has previously been a part time lecturer at Trinity College (MSc Management of Information Systems), and UCD (MA in Cultural Policy). He was awarded the Fundraising Ireland Fundraiser of the Year Award in 2010 and was a recipient of the Arthur Guinness Fund for his work on Ireland’s only crowdfunding platform www.fundit.ie.

Professor Enda Delaney – School of History, Classics and Archaeology, University of Edinburgh

Born and raised in Dublin, Enda Delaney holds degrees from the National University of Ireland (BA, MA) and Queen’s University Belfast (PhD).
Having previously held lectureships at Queen's University Belfast and the University of Aberdeen, he joined the University of Edinburgh in 2006, and was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2008, Reader in 2010, and then to Professor of Modern History in 2015.

He has written extensively on the history of modern Ireland and its diaspora, including three scholarly books and three jointly-edited volumes.

His research has focused on three interrelated themes: emigration and the Irish diaspora, locating Irish history in a transnational and global context, and developing a historical framework for understanding the Irish experience of modernity in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Current research project explores the Irish encounter with modernity, funded by an ESRC Mid-Career Fellowship and is writing a book, Making Ireland Modern: Society and Culture since 1780, based on this project for Oxford UP. He continues to research and write on the history of the Irish diaspora and the Great Irish Famine. He is a founding member of the international research network Transnational Ireland.

Catriona Crowe is Head of Special Projects at the National Archives of Ireland. She is Manager of the Irish Census Online Project, which has placed the 1901 and 1911 censuses online free of charge over the last 5 years. She is an Editor of Documents on Irish Foreign Policy, which published its seventh volume, covering the period 1941-45, in November 2010. She is editor of Dublin 1911, published by the Royal Irish Academy in late 2011.

She is Vice-President of the Irish Labour History Society, and a former President of the Women’s History Association. She is Chairperson of the Irish Theatre Institute, which promotes and supports Irish theatre and has created an award-winning website of Irish theatre productions.

She is Chairperson of the SAOL Project, a rehabilitation initiative for women with addiction problems, based in the North Inner City, and also Chairperson of the Inner City Renewal Group, which delivers employment and welfare rights advice and support to the community in the North Inner City. She contributes regularly to the broadcast and print media on cultural and historical matters. She is a member of the Royal Irish Academy.