QS World University Rankings 2023

We are delighted to announce that the Discipline of English has ranked 91st globally in the 2023 QS World University Subject Rankings.

See https://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/university-subject-rankings/2023/english-language-literature?&page=0
 
Congratulations too to our School of English, Media, and Creative Arts colleagues in Drama and Music who were ranked 120th in the Performing Arts category.
QS Rankings 2023

Vacancy, Writer-in-Residence 2025

VACANCY: WRITER IN RESIDENCE 2025
The Arts Council and University of Galway invite applications from mid-career and established writers for Writer in Residence for the calendar year 2025.
The Writer in Residence will engage with students on the university’s specialist BA and MA programmes in Creative Writing. This may take the form of classes/clinics/workshops/consultations
or other modes of adding value to the students’ ongoing core work with their university teachers. The broader community/public engagement contribution may take varied forms, depending on the
Writer’s own interests and ideas, and this aspect can be discussed and planned well in advance.
Applications should be sent to Creative John Kenny at john.kenny@universityofgalway.ie by 5.30 pm on Thursday, 3 October. Applications will be accepted by email only. Applications received after the closing date will not be accepted.

See https://www.artscouncil.ie/uploadedFiles/Main_Site/Content/News/Literature/University%20of%20Galway%20Writer%20in%20Residence%20Advert_2025.pdf for details

Nowthen

Dr Frances McCormack narrates "Nowthen," a short film made about Finnegans Wake 85, to commemorate the 85th anniversary of the publication of Finnegans Wake. Frances researches on the emotions and the senses in this notoriously difficult text.#

Click https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvTIiaby62Q

Writer-in-Residence 2024

We are delighted to welcome John Patrick McHugh as Arts Council Writer-in-Residence for 2024.

John Patrick is from Galway. His work has appeared in The Stinging Fly, Winter Papers, Banshee, The Tangerine and Granta and been broadcast on BBC Radio3.
He is the fiction editor for Banshee magazine.
His debut collection of short stories, Pure Gold, is published by 4th Estate. See 
https://www.4thestate.co.uk/products/pure-gold-john-patrick-mchugh-9780008490652/

An Post Irish Book Awards 2023

An Post Irish Book Awards 2023

An Post Irish Book Awards:
 
Congratulations to our colleague Elaine Feeney, who is shortlisted for Eason Novel of the Year for How To Build A Boat (Harvill Secker), which was also nominated for this year’s Booker Prize.
 
Congratulations too to Aoife Barry, one of our Irish Writers Centre ‘Evolution’ writers teaching this semester on our BA in English and Creative Writing, who is on The Last Word Listeners’ Choice shortlist for her book Social Capital: Life Online in the Shadow of Ireland’s Tech Boom (HarperCollins).
 
The Book Awards are decided via a 50/50 combination of votes by the judging panel and public online voting. Please do consider adding your vote for Elaine and Aoife and spread the word. You can vote here

https://www.irishbookawards.ie/vote/ and it’s a quick process.

President's Award for Excellence in Teaching

University of 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 University of 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 Muireann O'Cinneide2015 
Dr Rebecca Barr2013
Dr Frances McCormack2010
Dr Ros Dixon: 2007 

IRC New Foundations Grant 2019

Dr Justin Tonra has been awarded an Irish Research Council New Foundations grant for his project Poetry Machines: Technologies of Poetic Composition. New Foundations supports researchers to pursue research, networking and dissemination activities within and between all disciplines. It provides seed funding for small-scale research actions; the development of networks, consortia and workshops; and creative approaches to the communication of scientific concepts or complex societal challenges for a lay audience. Dr Tonra’s award was one of thirteen funded under the STEAM strand, which aims to bring science and art, design and the humanities together to work on new ways of communicating scientific concepts and complex societal challenges for a lay audience.

 Project summary: Poetry has a long and fascinating relationship with technology that bridges the apparent gap between the humanities and sciences. The printing press, the typewriter, and the tape recorder have each offered radical new formal possibilities to poets, while the digital age has yielded computational methods for generating verse that challenge our basic understandings of the creative process. Poetry Machines is a project which will survey the long history of poetry machines, and communicate the neglected story of how the precepts of science, engineering, and mathematics, have been used to make and shape poetry.

 See http://research.ie/what-we-do/loveirishresearch/blog/irish-research-council-announces-100-new-awards-to-support-research-collaboration-and-dissemination/ for details.

Research into the social network structures of Ossian

 Dr Justin Tonra’s research into the social network structures of Ossian is now a short film! https://youtu.be/TUUeETqGMlE

Working with collaborators at Coventry and Oxford Universities, Dr Tonra’s research demonstrated that the underlying network structures of James Macpherson’s Ossian poems are less similar to the Homeric epics (a parallel which Macpherson attempted to emphasise) than to the literature of the Irish Fenian Cycle (whose influence Macpherson disavowed).

Read the original research at https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S0219525916500089 [subscription];
 https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.00142 [open access].

Galway University Foundation/Ros Dixon Fellow Seminar

Dr Stefan Aquilina, 2019 Galway University Foundation/Dr Ros Dixon Fellow, will give a talk on  Modern Theatre in Russia: Research Methodologies on 11th September at 5pm in O’Donoghue Theatre, Centre for Theatre and Performance, University of Galway.

Dr Stefan Aquilina is Director of Research and Internationalisation of the School of Performing Arts and Theatre Studies Senior Lecturer at the University of Malta. His research focuses on modern theatre, especially Stanislavsky and Meyerhold, but has wider interest in the transmission of embodied practice, amateur theatre, devised performance, and reflective teaching. Aquilina’s publications include Stanislavsky in the World (coedited with Jonathan Pitches, Bloomsbury), Interdisciplinarity in the Performing Arts (coedited with Malaika Sarco-Thomas, University Malta Press), and numerous essays in journals like Studies in Theatre and PerformanceTheatre, Dance and Performance TrainingJournal of Dramatic Theory and CriticismTheatre History Studies, and Theatre Studies International. His forthcoming monograph, which comes out in 2020 on Bloomsbury, tackles Russian modernism from the point of view of cultural transmission. Aquilina is also the director of the practice-based project Cultural Transmission of Actor Training Techniques (www.ctatt.org).

 ALL WELCOME!

 Contact:  Elizabeth.Tilley@nuigalway.ie or Charlotte.McIvor@nuigalway.ie

GUF Ros Dixon Visiting Research Fellowship

Galway University Foundation Ros Dixon Visiting Research Fellowship

Applications are invited from researchers in the fields of Russian literature, Drama and Performance, and Theatre Studies, for the inaugural Galway University Foundation Ros Dixon Visiting Research Fellowship. This award is endowed in the honour of the late Dr. Ros Dixon, who specialised in Russian drama, and whose collection is housed in the Hardiman Library. The catalogue for the Ros Dixon Library of Drama and Theatre History and Performance, housed in Special Collections, may be consulted at http://library.nuigalway.ie/, using ‘Ros Dixon former owner’ as the search term.

The fellowship, up to the amount of €3,000, is for a maximum duration of 4 weeks. Applicants must be engaged in research in one of the designated fields – Russian literature, Russian literature in translation, Drama and Performance, Theatre Studies – and may be graduate students, early career researchers, or established scholars. The Fellow will be housed at the Moore Institute for Research in the Humanities and Social Studies. 

See  http://universityofgalway.ie/colleges-and-schools/arts-social-sciences-and-celtic-studies/humanities/disciplines-centres/english/research/#tab2  for further details and application form.
Closing date for applications is 15 March 2019.

Publications

 Visit the School of English & Creative Arts website to see details of some of our most recent publications.

 Publications book spines