NUI Galway Student Awarded Gold Medal at New York Festival Awards

NUI Galway PhD student, Thérèse McIntyre, was recently awarded a Gold Medal for Best Radio Programme in the 'Educational' category at the recent New York Festival Awards Gala.
Jul 07 2014 Posted: 14:04 IST

NUI Galway PhD student, Thérèse McIntyre, was recently awarded a Gold Medal for Best Radio Programme in the 'Educational' category at the recent New York Festival Awards Gala. Thérèse was awarded the Gold Medal for a series of radio shows she made while doing her PhD at NUI Galway.

Thérèse, originally from Detroit in the US, came to Ireland in 1996 to pursue independent studies of the various aspects of Irish traditional culture - music, song, and dance - with a particular focus on the song tradition. She has spent several years collecting songs, both in the English and the Irish languages, from various areas throughout Ireland and America and worked with individuals who are well known both inside and outside of the tradition. Thérèse’s particular area of research allows her to combine her academic strengths in Irish Studies and History with her longstanding personal interest in Irish traditional song and ballad.

Thérèse was part of the first group to graduate from the Centre for Irish Studies with a Diploma in Irish Studies in 2002.  She subsequently received her BA in History and English from NUI Galway (2008) and recently completed her Masters in Irish Studies, also at NUI Galway (2009).  Her Masters thesis, titled ‘Another Martyr for Old Ireland’: Historical ‘Fact’ versus Folk Memory - Kevin Barry as a ‘Hero’ in the Irish Ballad Tradition’, examines the legitimacy of using the narratives contained within songs of the ballad tradition as valid sources of historical information, particularly with respect to figures such as Kevin Barry, who essentially have been marginalised by historians and also explores the song’s influence on the social memory of modern-day Ireland.

In 2009, Thérèse was awarded an Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Science (IRCHSS) Scholarship. Her PhD, which commenced in October 2009, is titled ‘Historical ‘Fact’ versus ‘Folk’ Memory:  The Creation and Representation of ‘Heroes’ in Irish Traditional Song and Ballad'.

The series 'Herosongs', based upon Chapter One of the PhD project, is an eight part series is an Athena Media production for RTÉ Radio 1. Presented by singer and academic Therese McIntyre, who traces the journey of ballads from the 16th century to today and explores how they shape or distort our understanding of history, real events and real people like Henry Joy McCracken in 1798 or Jim Larkin in 1913. In the series we hear from historians including Diarmaid Ferriter, Kevin Whelan, Eunan O’Halpin, Mike Cronin, and Lillis Ó Laoire, song collector and scholar John Moulden and traditional music experts Nicholas Carolan and Grace Toland from the Irish Traditional Music Archive. Therese is joined by singers from the Góilín Traditional Singers Club, singers Iarla Ó Lionáird, Nóirín Ní Riain, Frances Black, Niamh Parsons, Derek Warfield and composer Eric Bogle among others, who share their own relationship with history, song and these sung heroes.

The series of radio shows can be found at https://audioboo.fm/boos/1502239-herosongs-1-where-history-meets-song-episode-one

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