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QS World University Rankings 2025

We are delighted to announce that the Discipline of English has ranked in the top 101-150 in the 2025 QS World University Subject Rankings.

See https://www.topuniversities.com/qs-world-university-rankings

Congratulations too to our School of English, Media, and Creative Arts colleagues in Drama and Music who were ranked in the top 100 in the Performing Arts category.

QS World University Rankings

We are delighted to announce that the Discipline of English has ranked 89th globally in the 2024 QS World University Subject Rankings.

This is an improvement on our ranking of 91st in 2023.
See https://www.topuniversities.com/qs-world-university-rankings

Congratulations too to our School of English, Media, and Creative Arts colleagues in Drama and Music who were ranked in the top 100 in the Performing Arts category.

Imirce

Imirce: The Kerby A. Miller Collection: Irish Emigrant Letters and Memoirs from North America.

The University of Galway Library is home to Imirce: The Kerby A. Miller Collection: Irish Emigrant Letters and Memoirs from North America.
Imirce is a project with two discrete elements. First, it makes available via an online database a vast collection of transcripts of Irish emigrant letters and memoirs compiled over some fifty-years by historian Kerby A. Miller. Second, it continues Miller’s work of collection through regular appeals for additional material to be added to the database. Since its launch in March 2024, Imirce has featured in national and international media, most recently (2 November 2024) being the subject of Tim Desmond’s A Letter Home, RTÉ Radio 1’s Documentary on One: https://www.rte.ie/radio/doconone/1478028-a-letter-home

For additional information, see https://imirce.universityofgalway.ie/p/ms

To suggest material for addition to the database, see https://imirce.universityofgalway.ie/p/ms/contribute

Credit: James Brenan, News from America (1875), courtesy of Crawford Art Gallery, Cork.

Nowthen

Dr Frances McCormack narrates "Nowthen," a short film made about Finnegans Wake 85, to commemorate the 85^th anniversary of the publication of Finnegans Wake. Frances researches on the emotions and the senses in this notoriously difficult text.#

Click https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvTIiaby62Q

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 Muireann O'Cinneide: 2015
Dr Rebecca Barr: 2013
Dr Frances McCormack: 2010
Dr Ros Dixon: 2007

IRC New Foundations Grant 2019

Dr Justin Tonra has been awarded an Irish Research Council New Foundations grant for his project Poetry Machines: Technologies of Poetic Composition. New Foundations supports researchers to pursue research, networking and dissemination activities within and between all disciplines. It provides seed funding for small-scale research actions; the development of networks, consortia and workshops; and creative approaches to the communication of scientific concepts or complex societal challenges for a lay audience. Dr Tonra’s award was one of thirteen funded under the STEAM strand, which aims to bring science and art, design and the humanities together to work on new ways of communicating scientific concepts and complex societal challenges for a lay audience.

Project summary: Poetry has a long and fascinating relationship with technology that bridges the apparent gap between the humanities and sciences. The printing press, the typewriter, and the tape recorder have each offered radical new formal possibilities to poets, while the digital age has yielded computational methods for generating verse that challenge our basic understandings of the creative process. Poetry Machines is a project which will survey the long history of poetry machines, and communicate the neglected story of how the precepts of science, engineering, and mathematics, have been used to make and shape poetry.

See http://research.ie/what-we-do/loveirishresearch/blog/irish-research-council-announces-100-new-awards-to-support-research-collaboration-and-dissemination/ for details.

Research into the social network structures of Ossian

Dr Justin Tonra’s research into the social network structures of Ossian is now a short film! https://youtu.be/TUUeETqGMlE

Working with collaborators at Coventry and Oxford Universities, Dr Tonra’s research demonstrated that the underlying network structures of James Macpherson’s Ossian poems are less similar to the Homeric epics (a parallel which Macpherson attempted to emphasise) than to the literature of the Irish Fenian Cycle (whose influence Macpherson disavowed).

Read the original research at https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S0219525916500089 [subscription];
https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.00142 [open access].