We are pleased to announce the winners for our 2026 awards and bursaries, which will be presented at the Embassy of Ireland on 26th May. BAIS would like to acknowledge the valuable support of the Embassy of Ireland, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Cambridge University Press and the Irish Studies Review.
Book Prize
The 2026 Book Prize winner is Dr Catriona Kennedy’s Women, Politics, and the Irish Public Sphere in the Age of Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2025). Kennedy is Reader in Irish and British History at the University of York, with a research focus on Irish and British history in the long eighteenth century with a particular emphasis on gender, radicalism, confessional relations, and warfare. Women, Politics, and the Irish Public Sphere in the Age of Revolution explores how women from different social and religious backgrounds navigated late eighteenth-century Ireland intense ideological conflicts. Book Prize judges described the book as ‘a model of generous scholarship’, ‘a richly textured and variegated picture of women’s political interventions […] in Ireland in the late eighteenth century’, and ‘a landmark publication’.
Highly commended is Dr Connal Parr’s Solidarity and Pressure: The Story of the Irish Anti-Apartheid Movement (Oxford University Press, 2025). Parr is Assistant Professor in History at Northumbria University. His present research builds on his expertise in Northern Ireland to comparatively explore how states such as South Africa, Spain, Chile and others deal with a divided and violent past. Solidarity and Pressure is the first full monograph on the Irish Anti-Apartheid Movement. Book Prize judges described the book as ‘an original contribution to both Irish and global justice histories’ and ‘a brilliantly researched and highly readable reconstruction of the political and material realities that underpin international solidarity politics’.
Essay Prize
The winner of the 2026 Postgraduate Essay Prize is Sophie Anne O’Grady from King’s College London, for her essay ‘“A Conscience Worth the Name”: The Role of Censorship in Constructions of Post-Independence Irish Identity’. The highly commended essay for 2026 is by David Proud, from the Institute of Irish Studies, University of Liverpool, titled ‘A Hegelian Guided Tour Through James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake: “Well, to the figends of Annanmeses with the wholeabuelish business!”’
Also commended are essays by Greg Cotton, University of the Highlands and Islands, ‘From Michael Flatley to Paul Mescal: Irish Masculinity, Irish Dancing and the Ancient Irish Warrior’; and Ellen O’Leary, St Edmund Hall, Oxford, ‘Hostile Hospitality: Power and Provision in Claire Keegan’s Short Fiction’.
Bursary Prizes
Each year BAIS distributes up to £4,000 in Bursaries to assist research students working on an Irish topic and registered with British institutions of higher education by financing expenses such as travel, accommodation, and costs incurred in consulting archives or conducting interviews. Our 2026 recipients and their research projects are:
Aimee Warburton (Liverpool Hope University), Inverting the “Angel of the House”: How Irish Republican Women from Cork and Kerry turned the Mundane Militant between 1919 to 1923.
Aliana Kempson (Bangor University), Contested Lives: Women’s Political Agency, Activism, and Media Representation during ‘The Troubles’.
Fae McNamara (Teeside University), Men in the Margins: New Considerations of Irish Masculinity in Mid-Century Irish Women’s Fiction (1929-1960)
Fraser Cattini (University of Liverpool), Assimilating the Avant-Garde: Modern Irish Writing and European Art Movements.
Natalie Martz (St Hugh’s College, University of Oxford), The Role of the Irish in British Royal Navy Polar Exploration of the Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth Centuries.
Orla Hogan (St John’s College, University of Oxford), Censorship and Cultural Dissent in Twentieth-Century Ireland.
Alice Moylett Davies (University College London), The Nature of Archives: Encounters with Photographs of 20th Century Irish Forests.
Amy Bracken (University of Edinburgh), Irish Female Domestic Servants in Victorian London: A Transnational Perspective.
Davide Lamparelli (University of Edinburgh), Receiving Aid: Solidarity, Identity, and Emotions in Ireland and the Scottish Highlands in the Years of the Great Famine, 1845-1855
Greg Cotton (University of the Highlands and Islands), Oh my land, My faraway place: The near past, distant homelands and the performance of Irish and Portuguese nationhoods in the Eurovision Song Contest 1969 – 2024.