Staff Profiles

Formed by the disciplines of Sociology, Women’s Studies, Community Development and History, I am an interdisciplinary scholar who combines the social sciences and the humanities in my research and leadership work. 


LEADERSHIP: I have embraced leadership opportunities throughout my career in the university to include Head of School of Political Science and Sociology (2013-2017), Acting Head of School (2019-2020), Vice Dean Faculty of Arts (2000-2003) and founder member of the UCG Women's Studies Centre (1989-1992). I served as Vice-President of the Sociological Association of Ireland for two terms (2013-2016) (1988-1990), served as editor of the Irish Journal of Sociology (1995, 1996) and editor of the UCG Women's Studies Review (1992, 1993). I actively engage in collaborative scholarship with community, voluntary and arts based bodies.

RESEARCH: My research expertise is in social identities, lived experience, narrative inquiry and archival scholarship.  Working with the lesser known stories of ordinary (and sometimes well known) people provokes a consideration of how individual lives, culture and history intersect. Understood as 'social stories' they can offer insight into Irish identities and relations with others – and who we are in the present moment.

Previous research focussed on the lives and experiences of single women, poverty and inequality, rural women's lives and women and farming. 

Narratives of Ireland is a multi-perspectival thematic project on the formation of Irish Lives and Identities from a gender, family and community perspective, focusing on individual biography and community histories.


NARRATIVES OF IRELAND AND THE UK 2018-2022: IRISH-BLOOMSBURY CONNECTIONS. 

Irish-UK exchanges prior to the formation of the state are a current preoccupation and expressed in two book projects. 

• Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Irish Tour (1934) based on a critical edition of  diaries and letters (book due 2022). 

See Byrne, Anne and Gosling, Paul. 2018. Remnants of Mr. and Mrs. Woolfs Visit to Ireland in 1934, Virginia Woolf Bulletin, 59:24-32. 2.    

• The correspondences of Nancy Nolan and Leonard Woolf.  This project concerns the long term correspondences (1943-1968) of Nancy Nolan, Irish woman and Leonard Woolf, English man, publisher, political theorist, civil servant and husband to Virginia Woolf. The exchange of letters describes the life of a married woman working in the home, raising children, with a passion for books and reading and a man interested in  encouraging the life of the mind. (In preparation).

See Byrne, A. 2014/2015 A Passion for Books: The early letters of Nancy Nolan to Leonard Woolf (1943-1944) Virginia Woolf Miscellany, No 86, Fall 2014/Winter 2015, pp32-34, Southern Connecticut State University, USA. https://virginiawoolfmiscellany.wordpress.com/virginia-woolf-miscellany-fall-2014winter-2015-issue-86/ 


NARRATIVES OF IRELAND AND THE US 2018-2021 THE HARVARD-IRISH SURVEY, IRELAND AND AMERICA.  

This is a 3-phase participatory project with publications, exhibition and media outputs with a focus on the 1930s social anthropological study of Ireland conducted by Harvard academics. One of the publications, Family and Community in Ireland (1940) by Conrad Arensberg and Solon Kimball is not only a classical account of  a changing rural society in the 1930s, but has become a standard reference for understanding the agricultural family system and the social mechanisms that sustained a traditional form of family life with its benefits, costs, conflicts and consequences for economy, society and individuals.

WHAT IS THE HARVARD-IRISH SURVEY, 1930-1936 (1998-2007) 
 Part of an all-Ireland archaeological and anthropological study of a ‘modern’ nation conducted by academics from Harvard University, the Harvard-Irish Survey, had three strands: archaeology, physical anthropology and social anthropology. Almost nine decades later the story of the Harvard-Irish Survey continues to raise issues concerning the import of scholarly studies on  narratives of Ireland, Irishness and the shaping of cultural or national identities. Family and Community in Ireland was one product of the comprehensive ‘scientific’ description of a civilisation in the process of dynamic change.  

See Anne Byrne, Ricca Edmondson and Tony Varley, 2001, ‘Arensberg and Kimball and Anthropological Research in Ireland: Introduction to the Third Edition’, Conrad Arensberg and Solon Kimball, Family and Community in Ireland, CLASP: Ireland, pp1-101.

SUCCESSORS MEET PREDECESSORS (2008-2016)
The contribution of family, kin, and community relations in sustaining a rural way of life was the primary focus of Arensberg and Kimball’s study of Irish farm families.  Through the frame of a collaborative community research project with the descendants of the families written about, I invited contemporary farm families to read Kimball’s 1930s field diary which contained direct references to forbears (Successors Meet Predecessors, Rinnamona Research Group). This locally based collaboration provided an opportunity for community members to remember the laboring and family lives of ancestors while telling their own stories of farming, family and community in the 21st century. Importantly it provided an opportunity for successors to engage with the first hand anthropological accounts concerning their forbears and work with remaining sensitivities post the original publication of Family and Community in Ireland (1940). Deploying a narrative inquiry approach, the power of local stories to interrupt dominant narratives of family and community became the theme for Phase 2 of the project.  

See Byrne, Anne, and O’Mahony, Deirdre, 2013 Revisiting and Reframing the Anthropological Archive, Irish Journal of Anthropology 16,1, 8-15. 
Byrne, Anne and O’Mahony, Deirdre, 2012 Family and Community; (Re)telling our own story. Journal of Family issues 33, 1, 52-75. 

SHARING THE GIFT: THE HARVARD-IRISH SURVEY MANUSCRIPTS IN THE US and Ireland (2018-2021)
The aim of the present phase of the project, ‘Sharing the Gift’ is to collate and publish the Irish and US archival material and to work on the unpublished Harvard-Irish Survey records, manuscripts,  fieldwork diaries and letters, in the US/Ireland while communicating the story to a larger American and Irish public. Publishing the primary source material in the interests of public scholarship and general interest is a remit of this phase of the project. 


See Byrne, A. and O’Sullivan, E. 2019. Arensberg, Kimball and de Valera: A story of sex and censorship in  Irish Journal of Sociology. 1-24.

Byrne, Anne 2017. ‘Epistolary research relations: correspondences in anthropological research - Arensberg, Kimball and the Harvard-Irish Survey 1930- 1936’ in O’Giollain, D. (ed), Irish Ethnologies, Notre Dame University Press: USA, 58-87. 

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