In the final episode of this series, Maria Zukovs discusses her research on Franco-Irish relations with Dr. Jacob Baxter.

Maria Zukovs is a final year PhD candidate in the School of History at the University of St Andrews. Her research focuses on Dublin press coverage of the French Revolution. It seeks to understand what, if any, impact the French Revolution had on contemporaneous Dublin society, politics and culture. Maria has been the recipient of grants and bursaries from the Society for the Study of French History, the Eighteenth-Century Ireland Society and Marsh's Library.

Jacob Baxter is the Deputy Director of the Universal Short Title Catalogue at the University of St Andrews. He defended his PhD, which focused on the English diplomat Sir William Temple, in April 2024. Jacob's research interests include statement, readers and copyright.

In this episode, Dr Olivia Frehill and Dr Sarah Roddy discuss the topic of methodolody and historical research.

Dr Olivia Frehill recently completed a funded PhD in History at Trinity College Dublin entitled 'Silhouettes in a City: Women, Work and Welfare in Dublin, c.1890-1930s'. She has published on some of her research in outlets such as Irish Economic and Social History and RTE Brainstorm. She currently works as a research assistant and teaching assistant. Dr Sarah Roddy is an Associate Professor in Modern Irish Social History. Before arriving at Maynooth in January 2021, she spent 9 years as, successively, Research Assistant, Hallsworth Research Fellow, Lecturer and Senior Lecturer in Modern Irish History at the University of Manchester. Her doctorate and MA were completed at Queen's University Belfast, and my undergraduate degree in History and Politics is from the University of Limerick.
Dr Roddy's research interests lie in modern Irish and British social, economic and religious history. Her current project, entitled 'Visible Divinity: Money and Irish Catholicism, 1850-1921', is a transnational examination of the financial relationship between the Irish Catholic Church and its laity, and was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council in the UK; a monograph is under contract with Cambridge University Press.

In this week's episode, Keely Farrell and Kate Ryan adopt a gender approach to the history of food, in particular butter making in Ireland.

Keely Farrell is a postgraduate student at Trinity College Dublin studying Public History and Cultural Heritage. Inspiration for this episode came from a paper written for a course titled, Food, Drink and European Cultural Identities. In a similar realm, Keely has worked at Spritmuseum, a museum centering on the cultural history of drinking in Sweden and has developed tour content on Christmas food traditions at the Montclair History Center in New Jersey. She is a member of Phi Alpha Theta, a History Honor Society in the U.S. Most of her research focuses on early African American and U.S. history with a recent dissertation on the public involvement in searching for and discovering slave shipwrecks globally.

Kate Ryan is a multi-award-winning food writer and founder of Flavour.ie, a platform dedicated to promoting Irish Food. Kate is a food features writer for The Echo and The Irish Examiner newspapers, and her articles have also featured with BBC, Vittles, Sunday Business Post, Food & Wine Magazine (Ireland), Scoop Food Magazine, among many others in print and online. She also writes on her blog, The Flavour Files. In 2017, she published 'A taste of west Cork - artisan food guide”, a project funded by Cork County Council and Taste Cork.

Her paper 'Perfectly civilised and proper' – the social and cultural history of blood as food in Ireland was selected for inclusion in the Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, 2023.

She is a member and current Treasurer of the Irish Food Writers’ Guild, a judge for Blas na hÉireann, Great Taste Awards, Irish Quality Food Awards, National Dairy Awards and Restaurant of the Year Awards.

Kate holds First Class (Honours) in UCC's MA in Food Studies and Irish Foodways and Postgraduate Diploma in Irish Food Culture.

In 2023, Kate was named the Blas na hÉireann Irish Food Producers Champion and bestowed the inaugural award for Food Storyteller of the Year by Listowel Food Fair. In 2022, she was awarded an Irish Food Writing Award for the Food Writing category.

Emer O'Brien discusses her research on Irish nationalism and the Boer War.

Emer O'Brien is a fourth year PhD student with University College Dublin's School of History. Her thesis focuses on Irish nationalism and ideas around whiteness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, through to the War of Independence, investigating how Irish nationalists adapted global discourses of race for their own campaigns. She is a recipient of the Universities Ireland Centenaries bursary

Dr Irial Glynn teaches migration history at University College Dublin. He is also the co-editor of historyhub.ie and hosts a series on the history of nativism.

In this episode, Helen Doyle discusses her research on the Irish District Asylum system with her PhD supervisor, Dr Dympna McLoughlin.

Helen Doyle is a third year PhD student with the History Department at Maynooth University, where she is also a graduate teaching assistant with Academic Writing Support. Her thesis is titled ‘The Impact of the Criminal Lunatic (Ireland) Act 1838 on committal numbers to Irish district lunatic asylums’ and is examining the role of key-players involved in committal of ‘dangerous lunatics’ to Irish district asylums. Her research is also investigating the link between the stigma associated with mental illness in Ireland today, and the passing of this legislation that first linked insanity with crime, danger, fear and threat to society.

Dr Dympna McLoughlin is a lecturer at the History Department, Maynooth University.

In this episode Pearce Magee discussess his research on anti-lynching campaigns with Dr Melissa Baird.

Pearce Magee is a final-year PhD student at Queen's University Belfast, with a BA and MA in History. His research examines efforts to achieve the passage of a federal anti-lynching law in the United States, aiming to shed light on an important, yet often overlooked, chapter in American history and the fight for racial justice. Pearce has lectured on Lynching and the "Long Civil Rights Movement" at Queens and has presented his work at both the Barnes conference in Philadelphia and the annual HOTCUS conference. More recently, Pearce was chosen to participate in the Heidelberg Centre for American Studies’ Spring Academy, where he presented a chapter of his thesis and had the pleasure of collaborating with some of the world’s most exciting young researchers in the field of American Studies. Additionally, Pearce is a member of the Digital Learning team at Queen's University Belfast, working to improve the digital capabilities of students across the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences (AHSS).

Melissa Baird is Assistant Editor with the Documents on Irish Foreign Policy (DIFP) series at the Royal Irish Academy. She is an historian of modern Irish and American history, and her PhD examined the relationship between the Irish diaspora in the United States and the Northern Irish civil rights movement. Her research interests include civil rights, social movements, transnationalism, diplomacy, and popular culture in twentieth-century Ireland and the United States. Melissa has lectured on Irish and American history at Queen's University, Belfast, and co-ordinated several public history projects at the Linen Hall library.

In this episode, Robin Gatel discusses the influence of anti-heretical speech in Gerald of Wales' Topographia Hibernica.

Robin Gatel is a final year Ph.D student in medieval history at Trinity College Dublin where he teaches History as a teaching assistant. His research primarily focuses on the evolution of the anti-heretical rhetorics during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Through confronting different regional accounts, Robin Gatel is keen to demonstrate how the anti-heretical literature of the High Middle Ages can be used to approach a wide variety of topics.

In this opening episode of series two, Tom McGrath and Sandrine Tromeur discuss their research on Irish migration.

Tom McGrath is an Irish Research Council Postgraduate Scholar in the Department of History at Maynooth University. His thesis, entitled ‘An examination of the Irish in South Africa, c.1921–61’, seeks to further our understanding of the Irish South African community by examining how the development of Ireland, Northern Ireland and South Africa impacted upon the relatively small Irish population on the southern tip of Africa. Sandrine Tromeur is a PhD candidate at Maynooth University. Her research explores the history of the Irish community in La Rochelle (1602-1789), and focuses Irish men and women’s experiences of migration and integration in their receiving society.