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Explore the Future Humanities Institute

The Future Humanities Institute (FHI), a UCC Futures Institute, is an ambitious and interdisciplinary research community dedicated to understanding and shaping the human dimensions of today’s most pressing global challenges. We advance this mission through our Radical Humanities Laboratory, which supports innovative and exploratory approaches to contemporary questions, and through our interdisciplinary research clusters, which focus collective expertise on key areas of cultural, social and environmental concern. Through applied imagination, methodological innovation and engagement with communities, policymakers and partners, we develop ideas that open pathways to more just, sustainable and creative futures. A key pillar of UCC’s Futures Framework, the FHI serves as both a development catalyst and an advocacy hub. It champions the bold, creative thinking that underpins the culturally impactful and socially transformative research of UCC’s arts and humanities community. Our researchers are internationally recognised for their excellence, global networks and sustained success in securing competitive funding. Their work informs public policy, enriches cultural life and drives real‑world change, ensuring that arts and humanities perspectives are actively shaping Ireland’s futures.

Our Research Groups

The Future Humanities Institute comprises the Radical Humanities Laboratory, and a range of research groupings that synergise within and across disciplines.

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The Future Humanities Institute (FHI), is an ambitious, interdisciplinary research community dedicated to understanding and shaping the human dimensions of today’s most pressing global challenges

Prof Yvon Bonenfant

Future Humanities Institute Director

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The arts and humanities perform a key leadership role within the research ecology at UCC. I hope you enjoy exploring this small sampling of this work and achievements from 2024-2025.

Prof Yvon Bonenfant

Director Future Humanities Institute

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Working with members of villages in China’s multi-ethnic Southwest, ECura seeks out ways to empower communities to adopt digital technologies to become curators of their traditional music and dance.

Dr. Lijuan Qian, PI, ECura Project

Everyone’s a Curator:
Digitally Empowering Ethnic Minority
Music Sustainability in China

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The CASCADE team is excited to be partnering with some of the leading experts in text and cultural analytics and machine learning from across the UK and Europe.

Dr James O’Sullivan, PI, CASCADE

Computational Analysis of Semantic Change Across Different Environments. An MSCA Doctoral Network.

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MIGMOBS is a huge and ambitious project on the root of global inequalities: on the neo-colonial relations implied in a world of selective borders which dictate who can be mobile and who is excluded.

Professor Adrian Favell, PI, MIGMOBS

MIGMOBS - The Orders and Borders of Global Inequality: Migration and Mobilities in Late Capitalism

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News

11 Sep 2026

Disrupting Historical Amnesia: Archives and Contested Pasts

Disrupting Historical Amnesia: Archives and Contested Pasts' will take place at the Shtepps, 2-4pm on Friday 18 September. 
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Pictured at the launch of NorseMap are internationally acclaimed Norwegian musician Einar Selvik, founder of Wardruna, and Professor Tom Birkett, Principal Investigator of NorseMap and Senior Lecturer in Old English and Old Norse at UCC. Image: Clare Keogh.
11 Sep 2026

Vikings return to Cork: Einar Selvik launches major EU project inviting public to help map the Viking legacy

The sounds of the Vikings returned to Cork after 1,000 years as University College Cork (UCC) launched NorseMap, a landmark European research project exploring how the Vikings continues to shape culture, identity and politics.
Read on ucc.ie
07 Sep 2026

What do data sound like?

As the sheer mass and complexity of data generated globally continues to increase at a rapid pace, researchers are exploring new ways to reveal hidden patterns and implications that are not easily discovered through graphs or text. In a new interview with *IEEE Spectrum*, Dr. Stephen Roddy (Digital Humanities & RHL) discusses how sound and music can reveal these patterns through a process known as sonification. 
Read on spectrum.ieee.org
Prof Eugene Costello discusses the history of commonage
21 Aug 2026

Dr Eugene Costello discusses the history of commonage

Around 400,000 hectares of farmland is held under commonage, and it has the potential to become some of the richest habitat in the country.  Dr Eugene Costello joined RTÉ Countrywide to discuss the history of commonage and what the future could hold for Ireland’s uplands. Eugene is the author of 'Transhumance and the Making of Ireland’s Uplands, 1550-1900' and is currently leading a major €2m European Research Council Consolidator Grant exploring commercial cattle farming in Europe.
Read on rte.ie

Future Humanities Institute

Institiúid na nDaonnachtaí Feasta

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O'Rahilly Building (ORB) 2.20, University College Cork,

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