Research Newsletter - Issue 107: Spotlight

The past and present landscape - Research from the School of History and Geography

October 2025

Researchers from the School of History and Geography are tackling a wide range of pressing issues and uncovering some new perspectives on our shared past.  The school is home to a unique blend of environmental scientists, historians, geographers, and social scientists who in their own words “share a focus on Ireland – its geography, history and landscape.”  The projects they are undertaking address challenges that demand both rigorous academic inquiry and practical solutions.

Water, Land, and Environmental Futures

Water quality and ecosystem management form a considerable part of the school's environmental research output. Dr Susan Hegarty leads an ambitious EPA-funded project, developing tools and protocols for citizen science water quality monitoring as a basis for a national framework.

Dr Valerie McCarthy's EcoTwin project harnesses cutting-edge Digital Twin technology to revolutionize water resource management. This EU Horizon Europe initiative focuses on lake ecosystems, creating virtual replicas that integrate satellite observations, on-site data, and computational models to predict how these vital resources respond to climate change. The project's emphasis on ecosystem services—from flood regulation to drinking water supply—reflects a growing recognition that environmental management must account for nature's multifaceted contributions to human wellbeing.

The project investigates the current form of the wind and solar energy sector, assessing Ireland’s current infrastructural processes and waste management strategy in this area. By mapping current practices and identifying gaps in waste management, the research aims to ensure Ireland's energy transition is completely sustainable across the board.

Meanwhile, the FARM-NC project, led by Dr Jimmy O'Keeffe, bridges the gap between agricultural productivity and environmental stewardship. By developing a framework for whole-farm natural capital accounting, the research seeks to quantify the value of biodiversity, flood mitigation, and climate resilience alongside traditional agricultural outputs. This work acknowledges the right to farm while providing tools to support sustainable land use decisions. The project focuses on three small to medium-sized farms across Ireland, selected for their diverse natural capital assets and their capacity to deliver critical ecosystem services.

Turning to Ireland's dramatic coastline, Dr Niamh Cullen’s project employs sophisticated remote sensing techniques to measure cliff erosion. Using a combination of remote sensing radar-based sensing technology and image processing, her GSI-funded project quantifies how quickly Ireland's hard cliffs are retreating. Further analysis and modelling will help identify the main factors driving erosion.

Reimagining Heritage and Belonging

Dr Jonathan Harris' examination of diaspora diplomacy arrives at a critical moment, as Ireland grapples with Brexit's lingering territorial implications and rising nativist rhetoric. Funded by Research Ireland, his project investigates how diaspora networks function as informal diplomatic channels that can achieve a range of diplomatic aims. By comparing Ireland's diaspora engagement strategy with those of three other post-colonial states (Brazil, India, and Algeria) the research identifies lessons for migration governance, development goals and foreign policy.

Historical geography is a core strength of the School. This is exemplified by the contribution of the School to the Royal Irish Academy’s Irish Historic Towns Atlas (IHTA) project. Dr Ruth McManus, a leading expert on the development of suburban Dublin, is a member of the Board of Editors and she is the author of the forthcoming Drumcondra atlas, while Dr Jonathan Cherry is the co-author of the forthcoming Cavan atlas.

The project leverages the existing Meitheal Logainm.ie platform, which was designed for the decentralised collection and dissemination of minor placenames, to create a grassroots, holistic approach to cultural heritage.

Excavating Hidden Histories

The school's historians are recovering neglected narratives from Ireland's turbulent twentieth century and beyond.  Arguably, DCU is the centre of historical exploration of the Irish revolution with four noted scholars of the period in the School of History and Geography: Dr Marnie Hay, Dr Leeann Lane, Dr William Murphy and Dr Daithí Ó Corráin. 

In addition to publishing widely on the Irish revolution, Dr Daithí Ó Corráin coordinates the landmark Irish Revolution series—32 county-by-county volumes examining Ireland's revolutionary period from 1912 to 1923. This ambitious undertaking involves scholars across Ireland, Britain, and the Netherlands, making cutting-edge research accessible to general readers while revealing how national upheaval played out in diverse local contexts. 

A core aspect of Dr Marnie Hay’s work has been the role of youth during the Irish revolution. Recently, this has concentrated on girls’ involvement, including an article in Women’s History Review on the girls of Na Fianna Éireann. Leeann Lane is one of Ireland’s most prominent practitioners of the art of biography. She has produced a series of biographies of activist women, examining not only their revolutionary lives but their post-revolutionary ‘afterlives’. Her most recent biography, Mary MacSwiney, was published by UCD Press this year. 

Dr William Murphy’s work on the Irish revolution includes his analysis of Michael Collins’ diaries, co-written with Dr Anne Dolan (TCD) and published by the Royal Irish Academy. He is Director of the recently established DCU Biography and Life-Writing Research Group. 

All four are interested in utilising compensation and pension claims to access hidden stories of the period and so each contributed a chapter to the recent open access book 'A Very Hard Struggle': Lives in the Military Service Pensions Collection (2023), edited by Catriona Crowe and Dr Anne Dolan.

Dr Celeste McNamara's research into eighteenth-century Venice explores how ordinary people navigated the city's complex web of secular and ecclesiastical courts when dealing with matters of sexuality and intimacy. Dr McNamara previously contributed a Venice trail to an augmented reality walking tour app developed by the University of Exeter based digital history initiative HistoryCity. The app recently won a Heritage in Motion prize, awarded by the European Museum Academy and the Forum of Slavic Cultures. Celeste’s work on the Venice trail is, like the Irish Revolution series, yet another example of the innovative ways in which the School’s historians communicate beyond academe to a general audience. A further current example is Dr Leeann Lane’s exhibition ‘Cork Afterlives: Single Women and the New Irish State’, which has just opened at the Cregan Library, DCU.  Funded by Research Ireland, the exhibition will run at the Cregan Library till the end of October, when it will transfer to the O’Reilly Library, DCU, and then to Cork.

Dr Roman Birke's work is ambitious in the temporal and geographic ground it covers and, of course, in the themes it addresses. Later this month, his new book which explores responses to the construction of Population Control as a Human Right will be published by Cambridge University Press. One of his current book projects investigates genetic screening advocacy across Cold War divides in East and West Germany, as well as in Ireland and the United States. It examines the complex and uneasy relationship between the expansion of reproductive rights, discourses on genetic fitness/eugenics, and the role of international law.

Together, this diverse research showcases a research community united by intellectual curiosity and social engagement. Whether developing practical frameworks for environmental monitoring, preserving cultural heritage, or recovering historical voices, DCU's School of History and Geography demonstrates that understanding our past and present landscapes—physical and cultural—is essential for navigating the challenges ahead.