Human creativity, informed critique, and a steadfast commitment to addressing social challenges fuse together under the aegis of the Heritage, Culture and Languages Beacon to build better and more humane futures for all. Our research creates new cultural resources and shares their transformative potential with society, inspiring future generations of culturally empowered and scientifically confident citizens.
Heritage, Culture and Languages
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Interdisciplinary Humanities
Research on the Human Past
Political, social and cultural aspects of Irish, European and North American history are explored with foci on urban and rural settlement, migration, and international relations, through the culture, medicine, and religions of the time. We analyse the living legacies of ancient Greek and Roman to generate new perspectives on today’s global challenges. We interweave traditional philology and innovative digital methodologies to forensically dissect oral histories, the built environment, and material culture, using the stories of our past to understand our shared future.
Intersectionality
Our researchers approach this multifaceted field from original and distinctive perspectives that excavate aspects of identity such as class, race, ethnicity, disability, religion, gender, sexuality, and motherhood from where they are embedded in cultural legacies, languages, and literatures. Unpacking constructions of intersectional heritages and contemporary lived experiences involves exploring material and cultural aspects of lives that cannot always be adequately explained in identity terms.
Philosophy
Underpinning these topics is an active process of engagement with fundamental questions pertaining to our participation in shared human experience. From the foundations of Western thinking to contemporary issues, our work explores how the historical interpenetration of ancient texts with new and emerging ideas, perspectives, and material conditions laid the groundwork for the development of 20th Century European thought, and the possibilities of our future.
Languages and Linguistics
Irish Language
Our studies span the Primitive, old and Early Modern Irish to the language of the 21st century. Cutting-edge digital humanities methods and technologies are combined with a deep-rooted expertise in the medieval and modern literary tradition, textual criticism, comparative linguistics, and Ireland’s oral folklore culture. We research the literature, culture and history of Ireland from the early middle ages to the present, and contribute to the ongoing vitality of the Irish language.
English Literature and Language
Research in English critically engages with texts to capture the complexity of emotional life and social formations, bringing excluded voices into conversation with more dominant narratives. We strive to foster sensitivity to language as an instrument of truth-telling while critiquing its distortions, extending the imaginative possibilities of the present as well as the afterlives of the past. Work in English literature and language highlights the connections between critique, commitment, and activism, and literature’s vital role in engaging with the pressing issues and crises of our time.
Modern Languages and Applied Linguistics
Our language research programmes have a strongly intercultural focus, reading cultures through the prisms of language, literature, and cinema to deepen our understanding of other ways of being in the world. We have particular foci and expertise in the Critical Medical Humanities and Environmental Humanities.
Creative Industries and Applied Humanities
Research in the creative industries focuses on examining the socio-cultural construction of creative work: how inequalities and cultural contexts influence creativity and output. Practice-based research focuses on scholarly offerings in the areas of singing, traditional music and dancing, creative writing, screen production, alongside innovative acoustic and electro-acoustic composition and performance-based artistic research.
Media and Cultural Studies
Our research explores cinematic and cultural heritage, contemporary media feminisms and communicative politics. Media histories examine film production, marginalised women in archives, historical cinema worlds and critiques consumer cultures. Feminist media studies take action against bias in media industries and digital technologies. A focus on identity and politics under current communicative conditions explores how language shifts and is re-shaped through informational and media structures and practices.
Music
Music is recognised as a unique, nonverbal means of communication, discourse, and insight. Research in music technology, composition, musicology, and performance involves practice-based research integrating cutting-edge technologies in contemporary music composition; scientific research in new technologies for music making; historical and cultural research and critical enquiry in musicology and ethnomusicology.