We are pleased to announce the winners for our 2024 awards and bursaries, which will be presented at the Embassy of Ireland on 28th 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 2024 Book Prize winner is Laura Kelly’s Contraception and Modern Ireland: A Social History c. 1922-92 (Cambridge University Press). Kelly is Senior Lecturer in the History of Health and Medicine at the University of Strathclyde and Co-Director of the Centre for the Social History of Health and Healthcare. She is a historian of modern Ireland with expertise in gender history, oral history and the social history of medicine. This is the first comprehensive, dedicated history of contraception in Ireland from the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922 to the 1990s. Drawing on the experiences of Irish citizens through a wide range of archival sources and oral history, Kelly provides insights into the lived experiences of those negotiating family planning, alongside the memories of activists who campaigned for and against legalisation. She highlights the influence of the Catholic Church’s teachings and legal structures on Irish life, showing how, for many, sex and contraception were obscured by shame. Yet, in spite of these constraints, many Irish women and men showed resistance in accessing contraceptive methods.
Highly commended is Lloyd Meadhbh Houston’s Irish Modernism and the Politics of Sexual Health (Oxford University Press), and Andrew Phemister’s Land and Liberalism: Henry George and the Irish Land War (Cambridge University Press).
Lloyd Meadhbh Houston presently holds a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship in English at the University of Cambridge. Their work explores the cultural politics of sexual health, queer history and culture, and the history of erotica and obscenity, with a particular focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Irish Modernism and the Politics of Sexual Health provides a compelling and original perspective on the emergence and development of modernism in Ireland, and a detailed account of the medicalization and politicization of sex in Irish culture from 1880 to 1960.
Andrew Phemister is a Lecturer in History and Environmental History at the University of Liverpool. He is a historian of Ireland, Britain and the United States in the long nineteenth century, with a particular focus on their intellectual, social, and environmental histories. Land and Liberalism: Henry George and the Irish Land War demonstrates the wider, translational impact of the Irish Land War, and recentres agrarian politics during the late nineteenth century to show the continuing significance of the distinction between land and other types of property to political ideas.
Essay Prize
The winner of the 2024 Postgraduate Essay Prize is Sarah Mason from the School of History, Classics and Archaeology, University of Edinburgh, for her essay ‘Community Nostalgia and Transgenerational Trauma: Reconciling dichotomies from a women’s oral history of West Belfast, 1975-1995’. Mason’s essay utilises a series of oral history interviews conducted with women in West Belfast to consider the role of community nostalgia and transgenerational trauma within the post-accord landscape. She argues that nostalgia should not be dismissed as an unreliable assessor of historic communality and instead highlights its importance in understanding post-conflict community atomisation. Equally, her essay advocates for an understanding that nostalgic sentiments can co-exist alongside traumatic recollections and understandings of generational traumas.
The highly commended essay for 2024 is by Rachael McCreanor, from the School of English Literature, Language & Linguistics, University of Newcastle, titled ‘Understanding the Irish Revolutionary Generation: Nationalist Women’s Networks and the Radical Press’.
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 2024 recipients and their research projects are:
Mikelyn Rochford (University of York), ‘Extricating the Work of Flann O’Brien, Seán O’Casey, Máirtín Ó Cadhain, Brendan Behan and Pádraic Ó Conaire from Narrative Theory’s Normative Realist Assumptions’
Killian Beashel (UCL), ‘The Artists’ Book and Artists’ Publishing in Ireland, 1987-2022: Aesthetics, Contexts and Economics’
Ellen O’Leary (University of Oxford), ‘“Losing the run of ourselves:” Comedies of Appetite and Excess in Celtic Tiger Literature’
Hannah Evans (University of Liverpool), ‘A Comparative Study of Women’s Economic Agency in Medieval Ireland and Iceland’
Declan Houten (University of Liverpool), ‘“Shattered Glass and Toppling Masonry”: The Irish Revolutionary Period and Aesthetic Transitions in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake’
Elizabeth Garner (University of Aberdeen), ‘Encountering the Early Irish Poor Law (1838-1847)’
Simon Aeppli (University of Brighton), ‘Operation Bogeyman: The Folk Horror Landscape of 1970’s Northern Ireland’
British Association for Irish Studies 