Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow

Ciarán Rua O’Neill will be a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Art History and Cultural Policy at UCD from September 2024 (2024–2026). He received his PhD in the History of Art from the University of York and he recently completed a postdoctoral research position on the ERC- funded ‘Classical Influences and Irish Culture’ (CLIC) project at Aarhus University. Prior to this, he held teaching positions at the University of Cambridge and University College London. His postdoctoral fellowship project 'Visualising Hibernia, c.1770 - c.1930' aims to investigate how visual representations of Hibernia, the female personification of Ireland, historically transcended political, sectarian, cultural, and religious boundaries in Ireland and thereby reveal the historic diversity of Irish identities, as well as their complex relations with Britain and Europe. Professor Lynda Mulvin will be his supervisor.

Focusing on the period from c.1770 to c.1930, ‘Visualising Hibernia’ will produce the first dedicated study of this highly significant but neglected figure in Irish cultural history and Anglo-Irish political relations. As an inherently classical figure, Hibernia has typically been perceived as the ‘non-native’ embodiment of Ireland adopted by the country’s eighteenth-century ‘Protestant Ascendancy’ ruling elite or as fodder for nineteenth-century British political cartoonists. ‘Visualising Hibernia’ complicates such perceptions by foregrounding how groups across the Irish political spectrum employed the personification in the period c.1770-c.1930, ranging from a Protestant minority seeking self-governance under the British Crown to Catholic and radical republicans or Anglo-Irish cultural nationalists.