We would like to congratulate all of our prize winners for 2020. We hope to be able to celebrate their successes in person in 2021. We thank our judges for their scrupulous work in difficult circumstances this year and the Embassy of Ireland for funding our bursaries. The BAIS Essay Prize is kindly supported by Cambridge University Press and the Irish Studies Review.

Ambassador Adrian O’Neill stated: ‘The British Association for Irish Studies (BAIS) is a wonderful organisation that, through the academic sphere, profiles and celebrates the close connections between Ireland and the UK. I wish to congratulate the 2020 winners of the BAIS prizes: Aoife O’Leary McNeice (Postgraduate Essay and Bursary Prizes); Caitlin Brinkman-Schwartz, Niamh Coffey, Erin Geraghty, Conor Kelly, and Lisa O’Donnell (Bursary Prizes); and Maggie Scull (Book Prize). This strong cohort of academics are contributing to a more informed understanding of the shared narratives of Britain and Ireland across the fields of history, literature, and art. Since its inception, the bursary scheme has made funds available to postgraduate students working in Britain to explore issues formerly overlooked in the area of Irish Studies. I am pleased the Embassy can again this year support some of these awards.’

Awards 2020

The 2020 BAIS book prize was awarded to Maggie Scull for her book The Catholic Church and the Northern Ireland Troubles, 1968–1998 (OUP). Scull ‘uses the Troubles as a case study to evaluate the role of the Catholic Church in mediating conflict’, and her book was praised by the judges for being ‘a formidably impressive study backed up with extraordinary archival research and conceptual ambition’. It is ‘clearly a major contribution to its field’ that makes it ‘An impressive monograph’. Scull is a modern historian whose work explores religious institutions, secularisation, political violence, sectarianism, and peace, and currently teaches at Syracuse University, London. She was previously an IRC postdoctoral scholar at NUI Galway, Ireland.

Eleanor Lybeck’s All on Show: The Circus in Irish Literature from Joyce to Heaney(Cork UP) and Martin O’Donoghue’s The Legacy of the Irish Parliamentary Party in Independent Ireland, 1922–1949 (Liverpool UP) were highly commended by the judges.

This year our BAIS postgraduate bursary prize winners come from a variety of fields within Irish Studies fields including history, literature, and art. This strong cohort of winners includes Lisa O’Donnell (Royal College of Art), whose practice-led PhD project involves creating many series of paintings that explore the lives of twentieth century Irish women. Aoife O’Leary-McNeice (Cambridge) examines global networks of giving during the Great Irish Famine while Conor Kelly (Birkbeck) focuses on Northern Irish political parties and their attitudes towards European integration. Erin Geraghty (Warwick) will illuminate the possible imperialist agenda of British women participating in Irish feminist and labour movements. Caitlyn Brinkman-Schwartz (Oxford) examines the interplay between epic narrative and violent conflict from the Easter Rising through the Irish War of Independence and Irish Civil War. Finally, Niamh Coffey (Strathclyde) focuses on the experiences of Dundee’s Irish population during the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with a gendered and transnational perspective.

The British Association for Irish Studies is very pleased to announce that Aoife O’Leary McNeice from the Faculty of History, University of Cambridge has been awarded the 2020 BAIS Essay Prize for her paper on the ‘Dynamics of Gender and the Experiences of the first Female University Students of Queen’s College Cork, 1879-1910’, O’Leary McNeice’s paper examines the implicitly innovative, progressive, and often subversive experiences of the first female university students in Ireland, and in Queen’s College Cork in particular, in light of dominant contemporary ideologies concerning the correct roles of men and women between 1879 to 1910. Her study is a timely and relevant intervention that speaks not only to historians of gender and of education but also to social and cultural historians of Modern Ireland.