Three Fellowships were open to all QUB academic staff who have already been awarded sabbatical leave by their School for a semester during 2024-25.  As part of the award, the academics each receive £4,000 from the Institute to support their research activities, they will present their research in a Mitchell Institute Lecture or Workshop and will be provided with office space at the Institute, during their tenure.

 

Dr Síobhra Aiken

Dr Síobhra Aiken is a Senior Lecturer in Irish & Celtic Studies in the School of Arts, English and Languages.

During her Sabbatical Fellowship, she will work on a book project on the efforts of a group of Kerry-born immigrants in the industrial city of Springfield, Massachusetts to sustain a utopian, Irish-speaking enclave in their adopted home during the 1890s through to the 1930s.  As migration remains an ever-present feature of the global economy and political discussion, this book asks pertinent questions about migration and linguistic displacement, about assimilation and community cohesion, and about the language rights of minority and migrant groups.

 

Dr Eithne Dowds

Dr Eithne Dowds is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Law.

During her tenure, Eithne will develop her scholarship on rape law reform and sexual consent through the completion of one sole-authored paper provisionally entitled ‘Stereotypes, Offence Differentiation and Defendant Culpability in Rape Reform: Reflections on a Negligent Rape Offence’, as well as drafting a proposal for a monograph entitled 'Sexual Consent and Legal Reform: towards a communicative responsibility approach'.

She will also explore external grant opportunities for a research project on supporting sexual offence complainants through the criminal justice system in Northern Ireland, and engage in co-creation activities with key stakeholders in Northern Ireland.

 

Dr Keira Wiliams

Dr Keira Williams is a Senior Lecturer in the School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics and Mitchell Institute Fellow: Religion, Arts and Peacebuilding.

Charlie’s Place, a nightclub in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, hosted the most famous African American performers of the mid-twentieth century, including Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday, Ruth Brown, Little Richard, and Duke Ellington.  At the same time that Jack Kerouac hit the road to write the alternative bible of his generation, Black entrepreneur Charlie Fitzgerald fostered a tightly-knit Beat community in a small corner of the deep South, with “Beat” referring to beach-bum bohemians and to the thumping rhythms of the new music that would become rock and roll.  Threatened by the very existence of this subculture, the Ku Klux Klan attacked Charlie’s Place in late August of 1950. Under pressure from Fitzgerald, who barely escaped a lynching that night, the FBI opened an investigation that eventually resulted in the imprisonment of the leaders of the Association of Carolina Klans.

As part of her tenure, Keira will spend several weeks in the local newspaper archives on the Carolina coast as part of the research for her next book, Mighty Man and the Southern Beats.

Mighty Man will tell the story of how Black cultural, social, and political resistance merged with white youthful rejection of Cold War conformity, using Charlie’s Place as a case study of an openly defiant community that prefigured the more famous rebellions of the following generation.

 

The Sabbatical Fellows will commence their tenures on 1 September 2024.  We look forward to providing updates on their activity in the coming academic year.

Mitchell Institute Director Professor Richard English commented: 'We're delighted to welcome Siobhra, Eithne and Keira to the Mitchell Institute as Sabbatical Fellows, and we hope that their time in the Institute will help support their pioneering and important research.'