*including 3 MSCA Fellows

**Source: SciVal 2019-2023. Only publications affiliated with University College Cork included.

€24m active research awards, 2024-25

Dr Tingting Tang – School of Film, Music & Theatre

Bio: 

Dr Tingting Tang holds dual doctoral degrees in Ethnomusicology (UCLA) and Ethnology (Minzu University of China). Her research interests encompass several interconnected areas, including China’s intangible cultural heritage preservation systems, ethnic minority music in Southwest China, cross-border musical and cultural traditions of Yunnan, and Eastern European musical practices—particularly Bulgarian women’s choral singing. An engaged practitioner as well as a scholar, Dr Tang actively participates in social and community initiatives focused on safeguarding intangible cultural heritage. She is frequently invited to contribute as a moderator, researcher, collaborator, and consultant in related projects and events.

Research: 

Dr Tang joined the ERC ECura Project (“Everyone’s a Curator: Digitally Empowering Ethnic Minority Music Sustainability in China”) as a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Music at UCC. Her current work focuses on the collection and editing of metadata for folk songs of the Yi, Bai, Miao, and Naxi ethnic groups in Southwest China. In collaboration with colleagues, she also contributes to project website and database management, mobile app development, and content editing.

ECura Project Websites:

• https://ecura.ie/
• https://ecuraarchive.org/

Dr Aoife Price - School of Applied Social Studies

Bio:

Dr Aoife Price is an interdisciplinary scholar, educator, activist and leader in disability law and policy. She completed her PhD in Disability Law and Policy at the University of Galway in 2024. She is currently working as a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer on the TARA Project at University College Cork.  Previously, Aoife worked at the University of Galway, the European Disability Forum, and the Union of Students in Ireland.

Research:

The TARA (Trauma, Attachment, Resilience into Action) Project is a collaborative initiative between the Dublin South Central Integrated Service Area (DSC) of TUSLA and University College Cork (UCC). The project aims to integrate trauma-informed practices to support responding to the needs of, and improve outcomes for, the children and families who come into contact with the service.

Dr Aurora Moxon - School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures

Dr Aurora Moxon is a Research Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow looking at mobility, agropastoralism and ecotourism in the Aspromonte mountains in Calabria. 'Mountain Mobilities: 'Modernity', Mobility and Renewal in the Aspromonte' is an interdisciplinary research project that draws on the Environmental Humanities and Cultural Studies.

I use ethnographic methodologies—practice-based participant observation, interviews and informal conversations—to explore the links between small-scale food production, the environment and cultural practices. My research interests also include stereotypes of 'backwardness' associated with southern Italy and mobilities to, from and within the region.

Dr Auora Moxon on a farm in the Aspromonte with the family pig

Dr Alessio Aletta - School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures

Bio:

Alessio Aletta holds a PhD in Italian Studies from the University of Toronto and is currently an IRC Postdoctoral Fellow at University College Cork, with a project on Geography and Spatiality in Pirandello’s Works. His research interests include literary geographhy, Italian modernist literature, and comics studies. His articles on Pirandello have appeared in journals such as Pirandello Studies, Pirandello Society of America, Italica. He has co-founded the study group “TICS” (Toronto Italian Comics Studies) and most recently edited two volumes on Italian Comics in the New Millennium (Vernon Press 2025).

Research:

This project offers a groundbreaking reinterpretation of the role of space in the works of Luigi Pirandello (19867-1936), one of the most renowned authors in Italian literature. Through an innovative combination of literary analysis and digital cartography, I aim to reveal how Pirandello’s engagement with the material and physical world serves as a crucial framework for understanding his narratives. The project has two primary outcomes: a monograph and a digital map. This dual output ensures that the project has both scholarly depth and public engagement potential.

My monograph will systematically analyse the spatial references throughout Pirandello’s oeuvre, highlighting the intentionality behind Pirandello’s use of geography and demonstrating how specific locations contribute to the thematic and narrative implications of his texts. Second, I will develop a digital, navigable map that visually represents the geographical landscape of Pirandello’s works. This interactive tool will allow users to explore the spatial elements of Pirandello’s literature in a dynamic and intuitive way, making complex data accessible to both scholars and a wider, non-specialist audience and providing a customizable experience of Pirandello’s literary world.

By bridging traditional literary scholarship with digital humanities, my research paves the way for future studies on the relationship between literature and geography. The most immediate goal is to demonstrate that Pirandello’s oeuvre, often mischaracterized as overly cerebral and abstract, in fact engages deeply with the sensory and material reality, as his nuanced representation of local specificities, and cultural contexts reflects a deep attention to the human experience of place and environment. However, my project also underscores the broader significance of space and geography in literature as a means of exploring human interactions with the world, demonstrating how literary cartography can enhance our understanding of narrative and, conversely, offer insights into how writers like Pirandello shape our understanding of the physical world

Dr Aisling Shalvey - School of History

Bio

Dr Aisling Shalvey is an internationally recognised historian of medicine, specialising in the era from the Second World War to the immediate postwar era. She finished her PhD at the University of Strasbourg in 2021, which was funded by the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah in Paris. She worked as a postdoctoral researcher and project coordinator with the German National Academy of Science and Medicine at the Leopoldina on a project concerning victims of biomedical research during National Socialism, which was funded by the Max Planck Society. She is a Marie Sklodowska Curie fellow at University College Cork on the topic of postwar migration and health advocacy; her project title is Unaccompanied Children’s Access to Healthcare (1945-1950) (UCARE1945).

Research

Unaccompanied Children’s Access to Healthcare (1945-1950) (UCARE1945). This project examines issues relating to access to healthcare and financial compensation for medical harm done during the Second World War and explores how such practices have shaped ways of understanding care for refugees.

UCARE1945 will consider how discrimination based on age, statehood and gender played a role in pathways to healthcare in the immediate postwar era and will focus on the life narratives of child survivors of the Holocaust. It will be the first project to identify and analyse the life narratives of child survivors in relation to access to healthcare, combining research with archival sources, medical data, and lived experiences. This study will identify and analyse a selection of this archival material in order to chart the life histories of some of these young survivors. This project aims to expand knowledge of the complex issues child refugees faced in the immediate aftermath of World War II and will investigate how antisemitism and other forms of racism affected health care

Dr Julius-Cezar Macarie - School of Society, Politics and Ethics

Bio:

Dr Julius-Cezar Macarie, Department of Sociology & Criminology and Collective Social Futures is the Principle Investigator of Nightwork_Footprint project (2025 – 2029) funded by Research Ireland Pathways Programme. Currently, Night Matters: Sociological and Anthropological Perspectives on Life after Dark to anthropology, criminology and sociology undergraduates at University College Cork. His monograph Invisible Migrant Nightworkers in 24/7 London (2023), cogently unpacks the experiences of embodied precarity, the nightnographic component adding an original dimension to the inquiry.

Research:

Project title: NIGHTWORK_FOOTPRINT: A Synthesis of Contemporary CapitalismS Across Nightshift Cities

Funding amount: €676,282

The NIGHTWORK_FOOTPRINT project investigates and theorises nightwork. Armies of people, usually migrants, carve out an existence by working at night. For these millions of people across nightshift cities, nightwork means little or other way to opt out. Nightwork practices lie below the radar. They are conducive to the invisibility and multi-layered precarity, informality and irregularity of nightworkers. Yet, nightwork and nightworkers are underrepresented in labour history, and urban and night studies. Today the theoretical importance and empirical urgency of this research become even greater, as the current era of Nighttime Economy expansion does not focus on nightwork, but on nightlife.

Dr Rachael Wanjagua - School of Applied Social Studies

Bio:

Dr. Rachael Wanjagua is a postdoctoral researcher in the id+ Futures project at the UCC School of Applied Social Studies. She received her PhD in Disability Studies from the Department of Disability and Human Development at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Prior to UCC she was a postdoc at the University of Texas, Austin. Her research focuses on co-producing knowledge together with people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. 

Dr Joanna Wharton - School of English and Digital Humanities

Bio:

Joanna Wharton is Principal Investigator of Lines of Communication: Telegraphy, Literature, and Security in Ireland and the British Empire, 1794-1850 (LINC), a four-year project based in the School of English and funded by the Taighde Éireann – Research Ireland Pathway Programme. Before joining UCC, Joanna lectured at the University of York and Birkbeck College, University of London, and held an Early Career Fellowship at Lichtenberg-Kolleg, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen. She earned her PhD and MA at the University of York, and her BA at the University of Leeds.

Research:

LINC explores infrastructures of secret and high-speed intelligence in Ireland and the British empire. It centres on the optical telegraph, a human-powered signalling machine that promised to revolutionize long-distance communication at the close of the eighteenth century. Taking an interdisciplinary approach that combines literary studies, cultural and social history, and history of science and technology, the project traces the deployment of this system across an expanding anglophone world.

A key focus of the project is the work of Maria Edgeworth, a major Irish writer, and the telegraph invented by her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, which was adapted for use by the British East India Company in Bengal. By emphasising the interplay between telegraphy and literature in the pre-electrical era, and by paying close attention to the crises and failures of the telegraph’s use in colonial surveillance networks, LINC aims to provide new perspectives on narratives of state security and insecurity, particularly in the context of Ireland’s complex relationship with British imperialism.

Dr Noel O'Connell - School of Applied Social Studies

Bio:

Dr Noel O'Connell is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Social Science in the 21st Century (ISS21) and School of Applied Social Studies, UCC. Prior to joining UCC, Dr O’Connell worked in a number of postdoctoral research positions at Heriot Watt University, Trinity College Dublin and UCC. He received a number of funding awards including the DOROTHY COFUND Marie Skłodowska-Curie award (2023), Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship (2015), and the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission Grant (2022). He has published in the area of sociology, deaf education, social justice, human rights, identity politics and deaf studies. 

Research:

He is working on a project entitled “CODA: A hidden minority amongst the majority: An ethnographic study of children of deaf adults and the negotiation of threatened social identities”. The project is funded by the Science Foundation of Ireland (SFI) and Irish Research Council (IRC) under the SFI-IRC Pathway Programme 2022 for a period of 4 years. The project is supported by Professor Deirdre Horgan (UCC mentor) and Dr Gill Harold (UCC academic collaborator). The CODA project aims to use the methods of ethnography, participant observation, film documentary and fieldnotes in order to understand how CODAs experience the courtesy stigma (or stigma-by-association) of their deaf parents and the ways in which they use culture and shared experiences of community belonging as resources for agency, resilience and empowerment. Dr O’Connell and Professor Horgan are engaged as PhD supervisor for Seda Guektasch’s doctoral research project which focuses on gendered aspects of the CODA life experiences in family, school and community contexts.  

Dr Camila Tavares Pereira - School of Human Env Geog Arch & Classics

Bio: 

Dr Camila Tavares Pereira is a Senior Postdoctoral Researcher in the School of the Human Environment, Geography, Archaeology and Classics. She has extensive knowledge in the field of Climate Change and enthusiasm to work with research that aims to be inclusive and improve the quality of life of vulnerable populations.  

Research: 

She is working on a project entitled 'Transferability of resilience in informal settlements (TRIS): a model for assessing climate risk and empowering women as decision-makers' 

Urban dwellers in informal settlements are currently one of the most vulnerable to climate-related risks as they lack government support and civil structures. Thus, the main aim of this project is to develop a transferable Climate Change Risk Assessment model for informal settlements in the Global South with the community, especially for women. Also, we will transfer the community-based approach to reducing climate risks to Ireland. We will use diverse methods such as fieldwork, interview, workshop, and remote sensing. In this way, it will support the achievement of SDG goals such as gender equality, community-led measures, and climate risk reduction.  

Dr Ida Larsen-Ledet - School of Applied Psychology

Bio:

Ida Larsen-Ledet has a PhD in Human-Computer Interaction from the Department of Computer Science at Aarhus University, Denmark. Her research is driven by an interest in the subtle ways that our practices and behavior towards each other are formed by how technology is designed, and the ways we adapt our use of technology to make it suit different situations.

She has studied this through qualitative inquiries into work and the role of technology in people’s work, starting from collaborative academic writing, then workplace knowledge bases, and now more generally how people use digital traces to keep track of their work.

Research: 

I’m currently an EU MSCA Fellowship postdoc in the UCC School of Applied Psychology. My fellowship project, titled TRACE-WORK, studies how people use deliberate and incidental traces of activity – such as file version names or email timestamps – to keep track of work. Although we know that traces are an important means for people to coordinate work, we don’t know much about what kinds of traces people use or how they use them. By understanding this better, I aim to develop human-centered design principles for how workplace technology can help people draw on traces. Importantly, this research will incorporate an understanding of the social implications of traces, such as feelings of pressure to perform. I take a participatory approach, in which study participants will be involved in developing the research agenda and analyzing the data.

Dr Jessica Wax-Edwards - School of Languages Literatures & Cultures

Bio: 

Jessica Wax-Edwards is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action Postdoctoral Fellow at the University College Cork. Previously an Honorary Research Fellow at Royal Holloway University of London, her research interests include memory, violence and politics in twentieth century and contemporary Mexican visual culture. She has published articles on Latin American fiction and documentary cinema, graphic art and photography and her first monograph Documenting Violence in Calderón’s Mexico: Visual Culture, Resistance and Memorialisation was published 2023. Jessica was also a selected participant in the 8-month AHRC-funded mentorship scheme Doing Women’s (Global) (Horror) Film History (DWGHFH); her resulting short film Storylines___ was published 2024.

Research:

POPAMLO is a 2-year EU funded Postdoctoral project focused on enriching and developing global understanding of the relationship between populism, media and visual culture. The project focuses on Mexico’s former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (2018 – 2024), known as AMLO, and his adept use of different visual media – including documentary films, televised press conferences and social media – throughout his career. Alongside traditional means of scholarship, the project employs videographic methods to understand how populist personas are produced and what role the visual plays in spreading populist narratives.

Conferencia de Prensa Matutina, September 2024

Dr Brice Catherin - School of Film, Music & Theatre

Bio: 

Brice Catherin is an artist and doctor in music composition (university of Hull). He has 20 years of experience as an independent musician, intermedia artist and performance artist, and 7 years of experience as an art researcher.

His transversal and international approach to art practices has led him to collaborate with artists from all over the world. He also develops art projects and art-based PAR projects across disciplines with non-artists from the Global Majority as well as under-represented and/or minoritised populations in Europe and Southern Africa.

He is an affiliate artist of the UNESCO chair of the University of Glasgow since May 2024.

Research: 

As part of the UNICart project, I survey, assess, compare and contrast the range of methodological frameworks currently understood as being part of: ‘AR’ (artistic research), PaR (practice as research in the arts or practice-research), performance as research, research-creation,  the ‘artistic sciences’,  arts-based research,  embodied/somatic artistic research, and related, artistically -focused,  hyper-qualitative methodologies, across international territories.

Brice Catherin ©Andy Brydon

Dr Tatiana Vagramenko - School of Society, Politics And Ethics

Bio:

Tatiana Vagramenko is a Senior Postdoctoral Researcher at the Study of Religions/ Future Humanities Institute. She serves as a Principal Investigator in the SFI-IRC Pathway-funded project “History Declassified: The KGB and the Religious Underground in Soviet Ukraine” and in the British Library EAP project “Religious Minorities Archives and the War in Ukraine”. Vagramenko has held postdoctoral appointments at the University of Barcelona in Spain, Friedrich Schiller University in Germany, at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington DC where she served as a Fellow at the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies. In 2017-2019, she was a Principal Investigator in the project “Religious Minorities in Ukraine from the Soviet Underground to the Euromaidan: Pathways to Religious Freedom and Pluralism in Enlarging Europe”, funded by the Irish Research Council. She earned her PhD in Anthropology from Maynooth University in 2014. Vagramenko’s research focuses on the history and memory of state repression and cultural opposition in Soviet Ukraine, based on in-depth reconsideration of recently opened Soviet-era secret police (former KGB) archives. 

Research Project:

SFI-IRC Pathway project “History Declassified: The KGB and the Religious Underground in Soviet Ukraine” (HIDE) 

Website: https://www.ucc.ie/en/history-declassified/ 

Dr Leonora Masini - School of Languages Literatures & Cultures

Bio:

Leonora Masini was awarded a doctoral degree from Brown University in 2022, with a thesis entitled 'To Educate is to Civilize: Educational Campaigns through Cinema in British and Italian Colonial Rules (1910-1945)'. From August 2022 to June 2024, she served as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Slavery and Public Humanities at the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice at Brown University. The Brown Office of Postdoctoral Affairs awarded her the 2024 Postdoctoral Excellence Award. She is currently working as a Research Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow in the Italian Department at UCC.

Research:

My book project compares works by Alessandra Ferrini and Martina Melilli (visual artists), Erminia Dell'Oro and IgiabaScego (literary authors) to demonstrate that the interior temporal dimension has a critical part in these acclaimed works investigating postcolonial Italian culture and consciousness. I show that these narratives share a sense of postcolonial time that is not the chronological way of organizing events; instead, they construct time through non-linear narratives, flashbacks, images of mixed memories, eerie presences, and encounters with ghosts.

I note that the interior temporal dimension of these literary and visual works is a constellation of fragments from the colonial period, a mix of disturbing and haunting images from the crimes committed in the colonies that have never been collectively processed and acknowledged. I observe that the images mentioned above also convey resilience, and inform a new hauntology based on a counter-ghosting mechanism that I define as a de-colonial practice.

My book engages with studies and debates in different academic disciplines, Italian Studies, Black Studies, Diaspora Studies, Gender Studies, Trauma and Memory Studies, Gender Studies, Film and Media, and, unlike previous works focusing on either literature or cinema, it takes an innovative comparative approach investigating diverse primary sources.

Dr Roberto Cibin - School of Applied Psychology

Bio:

I have a PhD in Social Sciences - Interaction, Communication, Cultural Construction from the University of Padova (Italy), and I have always been interested in citizen engagement in relation to science, technology and innovation. My current research reflection and academic production focus on the debate about the design of technology, platforms and services to support empowerment, inclusion and sustainability, with attention to gender and other inequalities. For this reason, I usually deal with research using approaches related to Participatory Design and community engagement in general. I also had five years of practical experience working within a regional public administration to support digitalisation and open innovation. 

Research:

Currently, I am a Postdoctoral Researcher at the School of Applied Psychology (UCC). I am involved in BEHAV-I-AIR (SFI), a project dealing with communication strategies to empower citizens to contribute to cleaner air in Cork. The goal is to combine technological advances in air quality forecasting with community-engaged design thinking to co-create air quality alerts and behavioural prompts with the public to impact air quality-related awareness and behaviour positively. 

Together with other colleagues, I am involved in various theoretical and practical activities. First, I am working on mapping and prioritising the needs of various community stakeholders concerning air quality communication. I am then conducting an analysis of the academic literature on the topic. Finally, I am working on creating and conducting co-creative workshops to engage the people of Cork in designing a prototype platform that would provide information on air quality, suggestions on behaviours to adopt, and tools to support people's empowerment on the issue. 

Rachel McCarthy - School of English and Digital Humanities

Bio/Project Outline:

Rachel McCarthy is a PhD researcher in the School of English and Digital Humanities, where she previously earned a bachelor’s degree in 'Digital Humanities and Information Technology'. After completing a master’s degree in 'Digital Text Analysis' at the University of Antwerp, she now focuses on computational literary studies. Her research involves using techniques such as stylometry, natural language processing, and language models to investigate authorship attribution and writing styles, and to track semantic changes in texts beyond traditional reading methods. Passionate about advancing text analysis, she aims to uncover new insights into literary and historical texts using digital methodologies.