IRC Awards for two researchers in the School of English

3 Mar 2014

Professor Claire Connolly and Dr Tom Birkett have both won awards under the Irish Research Council's New Foundations scheme.

Professor Connolly's award is for  DUETS: Creative Practice and the Academy, a workshop designed to explore and develop relationships between creative practitioners and university research, with a view to enhancing existing relationships, building new ones and preparing arts and humanities researchers to compete for enterprise-focussed funding opportunities.


Dr Birkett's award is for 'From Eald to New: Translating Early Medieval Poetry for the 21st Centuty', a project run in collaboration with Dr Kirsty March which aims to share best practice and foster collaboration between academics and poets working with Old English, Old Norse and Old Irish poetry. The conference and poetry event will create a multi-disciplinary forum advancing our understanding of the practical, theoretical and socio-cultural aspects of the translation process and lead to the establishment of a network for future research and collaboration.

Additionally, Dr Armida de la Garza, Senior Lecturer in Film and Screen Media and Digital Arts and Humanities, was awarded funding for a symposium on Screen Media and Fashion: Unlocking the Synergies.

The film and the fashion industries have had a longstanding symbiotic relation as regards fostering both creativity and marketing (e.g. stardom, product placement, tie-ins etc.), with the fashion industry taking advantage of the spectacle of costume for the creation of ever more dramatic, expressive dress, and films incorporating fashion for promotion. Today, television and the Internet have been added to this mutually beneficial relation. Dr De La Garza will bring together scholars and practitioners with an interest in the creative industries and/or marketing, including fashion designers, costume directors and academics in the fields of cinema, communication studies and business.