News Archive
Historian awarded Marie Curie Fellowship
7 Jan 2014
Congratulations to Dr. Richard McMahon, part-time lecturer in the School of History, who has been awarded a prestigious Marie Curie Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship. Richard is a graduate of History from University College Cork.
Challenges to elite accounts of European integration are central to the current EU crisis. It is therefore vital to understand how European elites construct these ‘narratives’. The proposed research will examine the transnational community of European Studies (ES) since 1957, which had a crucial role in shaping these narratives. It will ask how the position of scholars within this network affected what they said or implied about the spatial reach and extent of integration.
The project will integrate multilingual discourse analysis of narratives in canonical scholarly texts about enlargement, spatial differentiation and culture, with social network analysis (SNA) of this scholarly community’s transnational organisation, using institutional, citation, CV and interview data. To de-centre Anglophone scholarship, and to examine the effects of transnational integration and relations between prestigious core locations (Germany and France) and less developed scholarly sites, the project will focus on the disciplines of political science, sociology and contemporary history in three case studies, the EC/EU accessions of the UK (1957-73), Spain (1975-86) and Poland (1990-2004).
Dr. McMahon will be based at Portsmouth University’s Centre for European and International Studies Research, and will work with Professor Wolfram Kaiser, a leading contemporary historian and interdisciplinary ES scholar with a research background in transnational networks, narratives and other relevant areas.