News

February 2019  sees the launch of EverVerse, a new conceptual poetry project led by Dr Justin Tonra. Using biometric data continuously gathered from a device worn by Dr Tonra, the project will generate poetry that responds to changes in his heart and sleep data in real-time, and 24/7, for the next year. View the yearlong progress of the poem at http://eververse.nuigalway.ie/

The project is a collaboration by researchers from University of Galway, the Moore Institute, Insight Centre for Data Analytics, and Maynooth University, and is funded by a grant from the European Association for Digital Humanities.

Galway University Foundation Ros Dixon Visiting Research Fellowship

Applications are invited from researchers in the fields of Russian literature, Drama and Performance, and Theatre Studies, for the inaugural Galway University Foundation Ros Dixon Visiting Research Fellowship. This award is endowed in the honour of the late Dr. Ros Dixon, who specialised in Russian drama, and whose collection is housed in the Hardiman Library. The catalogue for the Ros Dixon Library of Drama and Theatre History and Performance, housed in Special Collections, may be consulted at http://library.nuigalway.ie/, using ‘Ros Dixon former owner’ as the search term.

The fellowship, up to the amount of €3,000, is for a maximum duration of 4 weeks. Applicants must be engaged in research in one of the designated fields – Russian literature, Russian literature in translation, Drama and Performance, Theatre Studies – and may be graduate students, early career researchers, or established scholars. The Fellow will be housed at the Moore Institute for Research in the Humanities and Social Studies. 

See  http://universityofgalway.ie/colleges-and-schools/arts-social-sciences-and-celtic-studies/humanities/disciplines-centres/english/research/#tab2  for further details and application form.
Closing date for applications is 15 March 2019.

 

University of Galway in association with Tramp Press are pleased to announce the Sylvia O'Brien prize for imaginative fiction and experimental non-fiction.
A prize of €700 each will be awarded to two writers, who must be current students or recent graduates of University of Galway's MA in Writing, MA in Literature and Publishing, or MA in English.
Applicants must be within two years of graduation and have had work published or been accepted for publication (relevant information should be provided in the submission email).
Please send a sample of work (max. 5000 words) and a brief proposal of how you would use the prize to rebecca.barr@nuigalway.ie.
Closing date for submissions is 3 September 2018, 5pm.

Congratulations to Mike McCormack whose book 'Solar Bones' has won yet another prestigious prize – the International Dublin Literary Award. 
The judges praised 'Solar Bones' as 'formally ambitious, stylistically dauntless and linguistically spirited...a novel of extraordinary assurance and scope'

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/mike-mccormack-wins-100-000-international-dublin-literary-award-1.3528936

 http://jrnl.ie/4067440

Meadhbh Ní Eadhra, English graduate, was awarded top Irish radio prize at the prestigious National Student Media Awards in the Aviva Stadium last week (19th April). She was announced as the winner of “Iriseoireacht trí Ghaeilge – Raidió” by presenter Lynette Fay, Radio Journalist with BBC Radio Ulster, in front of an audience that included RTÉ’s Eileen Dunne, Senator David Norris, and Dublin GAA Manager Jim Gavin. Meadhbh's radio show “Gan Teorainn”, is broadcast live on Flirt FM 101.3 every week. Meadhbh spent many years working as a journalist and literary critic with national newspapers such as Lá Nua, Foinse and Gaelscéal, and presented current affairs shows on Raidió na Life and Flirt FM. She first began broadcasting on radio when she volunteered with Flirt FM as an undergraduate student, and she won the National Réalt DJ competition during that time. She is a published author who has written three award-winning books for young people, Rua, Fáinne Fí Fífí and Faye. She has received many awards for her writing, including Oireachtas na Gaeilge prizes and the Moth International Short Story Prize. 

Congratulations to Dr Justin Tonra, who has been awarded a William T. Buice III Scholarship by Rare Book School (RBS). RBS is an independent, non-profit institute supporting the study of the history of books and printing and related subjects. Founded in 1983, it moved to its present home at the University of Virginia in 1992. At various times during the year, RBS offers about 30 five-day, non-credit courses on topics concerning old and rare books, manuscripts, and special col...lections, and each Autumn invites applications for Scholarships focused on a broad range of constituencies and career levels. The Buice Scholarship will enable Dr Tonra to attend a Rare Book School course within the next two years. http://rarebookschool.org/news/rbs-scholarships-2018/

Congratulations to Discipline of English graduate Deirdre Sullivan who was one of the winners at last night’s Irish Book of the Year Awards. Deirdre studied English as a first-year student and then took the MA in Drama & Theatre Studies in 2005-06, when it was offered by the Disicipline of English. She also took some modules from our MA in Writing as part of that programme.
http://www.irishbookawards.irish/award/dept-51-eason-teenyoung-adult-book-of-the-year/%E2%80%AC

Congratulations to Meadhbh Ní Eadhra, graduate Discipline of English ,who recently won first prize in the national Oireachtas Literary Competitions 2017. The prize was awarded for an unpublished novel, Dath, which is due to be published by Leabhair Comhar in 2018.
Meadhbh's new novel for Young Adults, Faye, will be launched in Killarney on Saturday, 4th November, as part of Oireachtas na Samhna.

Mike McCormack, lecturer in Creative Writing, has won the Novel of the Year prize at the 2016 Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards for Solar Bones,  a novel constructed from a single sentence.
The novel is McCormack's third, following Crowe's Requiem and Notes from a Coma, which was shortlisted for the Irish Book of the Year Award in 2006. He has also published two collections of short stories, Getting It In the Head, winner of the Rooney Prize in 1996, and Forensic Songs.

NUIG English graduate Lisa Coen is one half of Tramp Press, the independent publisher that worked with Mike McCormack.  A great achievement for all concerned!

 Huge congratulations to Mike McCormack,  lecturer in Creative Writing, whose novel 'Solar Bones' has just won the prestigious Goldsmiths Prize.
McCormack’s ambitious and other-worldly novel plays with form and defies convention. This profound new work is by one of Ireland’s most important contemporary novelists. A beautiful and haunting elegy, this story of order and chaos, love and loss captures how minor decisions ripple into waves and test our integrity every day. Prof. Blake Morrison praised the novel's prose as "lyrical yet firmly rooted. Its subject may be an ordinary working life but it is itself an extraordinary work”.
http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/solar-bones-by-mike-mccormack-wins-10-000-goldsmiths-prize-1.2861887

The Goldsmiths Prize was launched in 2013 with the goal of celebrating the spirit of creative daring associated with the University and to reward fiction that breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form  http://www.gold.ac.uk/goldsmiths-prize/
The prize celebrates fiction that extends the possibilities of the novel form and previous winners include Kevin Barry and Eimear McBride. 

A new paper co-authored by Dr Justin Tonra has been receiving local and international press coverage. The paper examines the social network structures of James Macpherson’s Ossian poems, comparing them to similar network structures in the Greek and Irish epic traditions. An open-access version of the paper, published in Advances in Complex Systems journal is available at http://arxiv.org/abs/1610.00142 and coverage of the article has featured in editions of The Independent (http://ind.pn/2enSVr8) and The Times (http://bit.ly/2eA78yG), 21st October 2016. Congratulations to Dr Tonra and his team on this important and innovative research.

'Tiger Raid', co-written by MA in Writing (2003-04) graduate Mick Donnellan, has just been released on iTunes.
Tiger Raid tells the story of two mercenaries on a high risk mission in the middle east to kidnap the daughter of a rich businessman. As the raid progresses the pairs relationship starts to unravel leading to explosive consequences.
https://itunes.apple.com/gb/movie/tiger-raid/id1160081240

Congratulations to Dr Muireann O'Cinnéide who has been awarded an University of Galway President's Award for Excellence in Teaching.
Teaching and research are both central to the role of academic staff, and excellence in teaching and in creative and scholarly work go hand in hand. The President’s Awards for Teaching Excellence recognise the outstanding efforts of teaching staff to ensure University of Galway students receive the highest quality learning experience.

The Discipline of English has an excellent track record of engaged and innovative teaching: 4 staff have been awarded President's Teaching Awards since 2005 (of a total of 50 awards across the University): 
Dr Ros Dixon: 2007 
Dr Frances McCormack: 2010
Dr Rebecca Barr: 2013
Dr Muireann O'Cinneide: 2015 

PhD student, Carmel Lambert, has won the first Adam Matthew Digital Essay Prize for her essay ”The Love of Liberty Brought Us Here’: Writing American Identity in Liberia, 1830-1850'. The prize is awarded by the Irish Association of American Studies.
Carmel is the recipient of a Galway Doctoral Scholarship and is supervised by Dr Muireann O'Cinneide. Her Phd thesis is titled 'Inventing Liberia: Imagining and Representing Colony and Nation in American, Liberian and European Writing From 1820-1940'.
For more information see http://iaas.ie/news/the-winner-of-the-adam-matthew-digital-essay-prize/

Dr Lindsay A Reid has received two Millennium Fund Awards to pursue her research, including attendance at the upcoming conference on 'Epistolary Cultures' in York in March of 2016, where she will  be presenting a conference paper on George Turberville's Epitaphes, Epigrams, Songs and Sonets of 1567. 

Dr Victoria Brownlee has received a Millennium Fund Award to pursue research relating to her project ‘Hearts, Babes, and Bowels: the Body and Spiritual Experience in Early Modern England’.
Dr Brownlee will be traveling to the USA for a conference, and to the UK for  archival research.   

Professor Marie-Louise Coolahan is leading a research project funded by the European Research Council, called RECIRC: The Reception and Circulation of Early Modern Women's Writing, 1550-1700.
RECIRC is a project researching the impact made by women writers and their works in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and runs from 2014 to 2019.
Find out more at www.recirc.nuigalway.ie

Dr Elizabeth Tilley has received funding under the IRC New Foundations Scheme 2016 for "Nineteenth-Century Trade Periodicals: Transnational Perspectives", an interdisciplinary project that traces the transnational nature of labour as reflected in print culture in the nineteenth century. The project will examine a selection of trade periodicals produced in Ireland and England from about 1845-1880 to provide a mappable record of the concerns of 'labour' in the widest sense and its cultural ramifications. Outputs include a symposium on the subject at NUIG, a descriptive database that tracks significant titles in Ireland and Britain, and an edited volume of essays.  

Investigators are Dr Elizabeth Tilley, School of Humanities (English), University of Galway, and Professor Andrew King, Professor of English Literature and Literary Studies at the University of Greenwich.