Two School of English and Digital Humanities postdoctoral fellows, James Smith and Seán Hewitt, have been awarded seed funding from the Royal Irish Academy and the British Academy.

School postdoctoral fellow Dr James Smith - together with Drs Sarah Bezan of Sheffield University and Richard Gorman of Exeter University - has been awarded seed funding of €2000 by the Royal Irish Academy and British Academy as a result of a joint event for early career researchers organised by the academies in February. The funded event is on the topic of Coastal Blue Humanities, and will take place at the University of Exeter in the summer of 2020. It will provide an opportunity for scholars and stakeholders to share knowledge that will aid them in encounters with complex entangled webs of agency mediating the relationships between human coastal cultures and coastal biodiversity. James is a member of the Ports, Past and Present project based at UCC and funded by the European Regional Development Fund Through the Ireland Wales Co-operation Programme.

Separately, Dr Seán Hewitt (a Government of Ireland Research Fellow in the School of English), along with Dr Ailise Bulfin (UCD) and Dr Melissa Dickson (University of Birmingham) have been awarded seed funding for a collaborative, international and public project, 'Climate Chaos'. The project will explore nineteenth-century literary engagements with climate crisis and capital, and will be hosting its first public event later in the year.