Here we have 2024 BAIS Bursary winner Ellen O’Leary (University of Oxford). Ellen used her bursary to conduct extensive research at Irish theatre archives:

The bursary allowed me to conduct a week of research in the theatre archives at the Hardiman Library at the University of Galway. It provided the funding for me to travel from Oxford and helped defray the cost of my stay in the city. I needed to spend several days at the archives because many of the recorded performances I was watching were 90-150 minutes long. These recordings—plays by Martin McDonagh and Marina Carr—are only available on-site. As part of my research hinges on performed elements and audience reaction, getting to watch these plays as originally staged was invaluable. I also was able to look at production correspondence and script revisions, which I had thought might offer interesting context. In fact, I discovered a few items which complicated and expanded how I am approaching my research question. While the archives are itemised online, I needed to sift through in-person in order to assess whether they would be useful or not. The time and flexibility to do this has been immensely impactful.

I hope that my research will contribute meaningfully to conversations about contemporary Irish writing, in academia and beyond it. Within the context of academia, I hope to take this research and present it at forthcoming conferences. It will constitute a chapter of my DPhil dissertation, which I hope eventually to publish either through independent articles or, eventually, as a book. I also believe that my research has relevance outside of the sphere of higher education. I am studying writers whose work has a place in popular culture, and whose work has achieved critical acclaim outside of Ireland. I believe that my research complicates and contextualises the works of preeminent Irish writers not just in terms of the literary canon, but as meaningful artforms with which the average person interacts.

Ellen is a DPhil candidate in English at St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford. Her project looks at the intersection of comedy and appetite in literature and theatre of the Celtic Tiger.

Image courtesy of the Irish Times