News

MA in Journalism Graduate, Sean Dunne, recently won the Young Journalist of the Year title at the National Newspaper awards in Dublin.
Sean, who graduated with first class honours in 2013 is a senior journalist with The Irish Mail on Sunday. The Judges’ citation at the award ceremony stated: “With a flair for storytelling, this year’s winner penned a series of hard-hitting, in-depth and often poignant articles, which included an exclusive with survivors of the Bataclan attack in Paris.”
Sean also recently won a Law Society of Ireland Justice award for articles on jury service, which he investigated for the Irish Daily Mail.
Since graduating, Sean has worked across a number of print, radio and TV platforms in Ireland. His publications include The Sunday Independent, The Irish Times, The Irish Sun, and The Belfast Telegraph as well as a 10-month body of work from his time in New York. His broadcasting career has involved TV3, RTÉ and UTV Ireland.
See Sean’s award winning articles at http://journalismawards.ie/winners-2016/

The Discipline of English would like to take this opportunity  to congratulate Princess Okonkwo (2BA1) and Andrew Levie (2BCW1), joint winners of the Peel Prize in English Composition 2015-16.
These awards will be presented at the University’s  Lá na nGradam in February 2017.
The Peel Prizes in English Composition are awarded annually for excellence in the discipline of English and are based on students’ writing in First Year English.
Congratulations, Princess and Andrew!

Mike McCormack, lecturer in Creative Writing, has won the Novel of the Year prize at the 2016 Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards for Solar Bones,  a novel constructed from a single sentence.
The novel is McCormack's third, following Crowe's Requiem and Notes from a Coma, which was shortlisted for the Irish Book of the Year Award in 2006. He has also published two collections of short stories, Getting It In the Head, winner of the Rooney Prize in 1996, and Forensic Songs.

NUIG English graduate Lisa Coen is one half of Tramp Press, the independent publisher that worked with Mike McCormack.  A great achievement for all concerned!

 Huge congratulations to Mike McCormack,  lecturer in Creative Writing, whose novel 'Solar Bones' has just won the prestigious Goldsmiths Prize.
McCormack’s ambitious and other-worldly novel plays with form and defies convention. This profound new work is by one of Ireland’s most important contemporary novelists. A beautiful and haunting elegy, this story of order and chaos, love and loss captures how minor decisions ripple into waves and test our integrity every day. Prof. Blake Morrison praised the novel's prose as "lyrical yet firmly rooted. Its subject may be an ordinary working life but it is itself an extraordinary work”.
http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/solar-bones-by-mike-mccormack-wins-10-000-goldsmiths-prize-1.2861887

The Goldsmiths Prize was launched in 2013 with the goal of celebrating the spirit of creative daring associated with the University and to reward fiction that breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form  http://www.gold.ac.uk/goldsmiths-prize/
The prize celebrates fiction that extends the possibilities of the novel form and previous winners include Kevin Barry and Eimear McBride. 

A new paper co-authored by Dr Justin Tonra has been receiving local and international press coverage. The paper examines the social network structures of James Macpherson’s Ossian poems, comparing them to similar network structures in the Greek and Irish epic traditions. An open-access version of the paper, published in Advances in Complex Systems journal is available at http://arxiv.org/abs/1610.00142 and coverage of the article has featured in editions of The Independent (http://ind.pn/2enSVr8) and The Times (http://bit.ly/2eA78yG), 21st October 2016. Congratulations to Dr Tonra and his team on this important and innovative research.

Congratulations to recent PhD graduate Dr Ciara Conway, who has been awarded the HD Fellowship in Literature at Yale University. The Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale offers fellowships to support visiting scholars pursuing post-doctoral or equivalent research in its archival collections. Ciara is using the fellowship to further develop the findings of her PhD thesis, 'On and Off-stage Roles of Abbey Theatre Actresses of the 1930s'. Her project will explore the connections between Irish actresses of the 1920s and 1930s and the New York theatre scene of that time. You can read more about Ciara's research at http://chasingaideen.com

'Tiger Raid', co-written by MA in Writing (2003-04) graduate Mick Donnellan, has just been released on iTunes.
Tiger Raid tells the story of two mercenaries on a high risk mission in the middle east to kidnap the daughter of a rich businessman. As the raid progresses the pairs relationship starts to unravel leading to explosive consequences.
https://itunes.apple.com/gb/movie/tiger-raid/id1160081240

Congratulations to current MA in Writing student, Shannon Kelly, who has been awarded first place in the 2016 Allingham Festival Poetry Competition. http://www.allinghamfestival.com/
Shannon won the prize with a poem titled 'On a Train in Cluj-Napoca – a meditation on ‘Da’ '.
A native of Lincoln, Nebraska, Shannon’s work has been featured in Off the Coast, The Summit Avenue Review, and The Tenth Muse as well as conferences around the United States. She also runs a travel blog and composes music, and is the recipient of the 2012 Lied Songwriting Contest.

 Congratulations to Sean Dunne, MA in Journalism graduate, on his Justice Media Award .
The awards (http://www.jmawards.ie/) recognise outstanding print and broadcast journalism that contributes to the public’s understanding of justice, the legal system, or any specific legal issues.
Seán's article "Names of no-show jurors will now be passed to Gardaí", in the Irish Daily Mail, used the Freedom of Information laws to reveal startling figures about those called for jury service and the level of failure to appear. This article outlined in a clear and concise way the laws and rules governing this element of civic duty, the impact of failing to fulfil that important duty, and the measures to be taken to address the problem.

Congratulations to Dr Muireann O'Cinnéide who has been awarded an NUI Galway President's Award for Excellence in Teaching.
Teaching and research are both central to the role of academic staff, and excellence in teaching and in creative and scholarly work go hand in hand. The President’s Awards for Teaching Excellence recognise the outstanding efforts of teaching staff to ensure NUI Galway students receive the highest quality learning experience.

The Discipline of English has an excellent track record of engaged and innovative teaching: 4 staff have been awarded President's Teaching Awards since 2005 (of a total of 50 awards across the University): 
Dr Ros Dixon: 2007 
Dr Frances McCormack: 2010
Dr Rebecca Barr: 2013
Dr Muireann O'Cinneide: 2015 

The Discipline of English would like to take this opportunity at the end of the academic year to congratulate Órlaith McDonagh and Daniel Mulcahy in 2BA English on being awarded the Peel Prizes in English Composition. These awards were given at the University’s  Lá na nGradam earlier this semester.
The Peel Prizes in English Composition are awarded annually for excellence in the discipline of English and are based on students’ writing in First Year English.
Congratulations, Órlaith and Daniel!

PhD student, Carmel Lambert, has won the first Adam Matthew Digital Essay Prize for her essay ”The Love of Liberty Brought Us Here’: Writing American Identity in Liberia, 1830-1850'. The prize is awarded by the Irish Association of American Studies.
Carmel is the recipient of a Galway Doctoral Scholarship and is supervised by Dr Muireann O'Cinneide. Her Phd thesis is titled 'Inventing Liberia: Imagining and Representing Colony and Nation in American, Liberian and European Writing From 1820-1940'.
For more information see http://iaas.ie/news/the-winner-of-the-adam-matthew-digital-essay-prize/

Dr Lindsay A Reid has received two Millennium Fund Awards to pursue her research, including attendance at the upcoming conference on 'Epistolary Cultures' in York in March of 2016, where she will  be presenting a conference paper on George Turberville's Epitaphes, Epigrams, Songs and Sonets of 1567. 

Dr Victoria Brownlee has received a Millennium Fund Award to pursue research relating to her project ‘Hearts, Babes, and Bowels: the Body and Spiritual Experience in Early Modern England’.
Dr Brownlee will be traveling to the USA for a conference, and to the UK for  archival research.   

Dr Rebecca Barr has been awarded a Lewis Walpole Library Fellowship at Yale University.
Entitled 'John Bull and Irish Bull: representations of Irish masculinity in late eighteenth-century visual satire', Dr Barr's project investigates how the depiction of Irish men, manliness, and sexuality reflects both national and political shifts as well as changes in ideas of masculinity.
More information about the Lewis Walpole Library can be found here: http://www.library.yale.edu/walpole/index.html

Professor Marie-Louise Coolahan is leading a research project funded by the European Research Council, called RECIRC: The Reception and Circulation of Early Modern Women's Writing, 1550-1700.
RECIRC is a project researching the impact made by women writers and their works in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and runs from 2014 to 2019.
Find out more at www.recirc.nuigalway.ie

Reid, Lindsay Ann (2017) ‘To the Tune of  “Queen Dido”: The Spectropoetics of Early Modern English Balladry’  In Singing Death: Reflections on Music and Mortality (Routledge, 2017). 
Dr Reid's essay examines the mythological and musical associations generated by a popular ballad about Aeneas and Dido as it circulated in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England.

Reid, Lindsay Ann (2017) 'Unsoiled Soil and “Fleshly Slime”: Representing Reproduction in Spenser’s Legend of Chastity'  In: Ground-Work: English Renaissance Literature and Soil Science. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.

 Reid, Lindsay Ann (2016) 'Oenone and Colin Clout'  'Oenone and Colin Clout'. Translation and Literature, 25 (3).  The article examines playwright George Peele’s adoption of Edmund Spenser’s character, Colin Clout, for his drama, The Araygnement of Paris. This appropriation, Dr Reid argues, testifies to a timely recognition of Ovidian pastoral precedents by early readers of Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender. http://www.euppublishing.com/doi/full/10.3366/tal.2016.0260

Gunne, Sorcha (Dec, 2016) “Prison and Political Struggle in Nadine Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter,” Journal of Southern African Studies. Special Issue on Nadine Gordimer, December 2016. 
Available at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03057070.2016.1255008

Gunne, Sorcha (2016) 'Reading Irish ‘Chick Lit’ as World Literature' In: Globalizing Literary Genres. London/New York: Routledge.        
In this chapter, Dr Sorcha Gunne explores what it means to read women’s commercial fiction—popularly known as “chick lit”—as world-literature. She focuses on the rise to prominence of the Irish brand of “chick lit” and explores the relationship between Irish "chick lit" and the socio-historic and economic constellations of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Ireland         
https://www.routledge.com/products/9781138898325

2016: UCD Press have announced the publication of 'Women Writing War: Ireland 1880-1922', edited by Tina O'Toole, Gillian McIntosh & Muireann O’Cinnéide. The collection is the outcome of a collaborative international project on women’s writing and conflict funded and supported by the UL-NUIG Gender ARC. Including an essay by Dr O’Cinnéide, the volume spans the Land Wars to the Boer Wars, from the First World War to the Easter Rising, the War of Independence and the Civil War, to explore the relationship between women and conflict.

Dr Elizabeth Tilley has received funding under the IRC New Foundations Scheme 2016 for "Nineteenth-Century Trade Periodicals: Transnational Perspectives", an interdisciplinary project that traces the transnational nature of labour as reflected in print culture in the nineteenth century. The project will examine a selection of trade periodicals produced in Ireland and England from about 1845-1880 to provide a mappable record of the concerns of 'labour' in the widest sense and its cultural ramifications. Outputs include a symposium on the subject at NUIG, a descriptive database that tracks significant titles in Ireland and Britain, and an edited volume of essays.  

Investigators are Dr Elizabeth Tilley, School of Humanities (English), NUIG, and Professor Andrew King, Professor of English Literature and Literary Studies at the University of Greenwich.