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Recent Publications

2023

[In production] Alfred Cort Haddon, a very English savage. Berghahn Books New York.

2022

‘Artist, Philosopher, Ethnologist and Activist: The Life and Work of Alfred Cort Haddon (1855–1940)’. Bérose International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, August: https://www.berose.fr/rubrique1116.html?lang=en

‘How roots of Riverdance can be found in Kerry‘, RTÉ Brainstorm: https://www.rte.ie/brainstorm/2022/0224/1181436-riverdance-roots-kerry-folk-dance-siamsa-tire/

‘Don’t Kick That Skull or the Dead Will Come after You!’ RTÉ Brainstorm: https://www.rte.ie/brainstorm/2021/0825/1242817-ireland-folklore-skulls-human-remains-dead-bodies-graveyard-cemetery/.

2021

‘Anarchy in the UK: Haddon and the Anarchist Agenda in the Anglo-Irish Folklore Movement’, in Matthew Cheeseman and Carina Hart (eds), Folklore and Nation in Britain and Ireland, 78-99. London: Routledge.

‘The case of the missing skulls from Inishbofin‘ RTÉ Brainstorm: https://www.rte.ie/brainstorm/2021/0411/1209153-skulls-inishbofin-stolen-return-head-hunter/

‘The head-hunter who measured Irishmen’s skulls’, RTÉ Brainstorm: https://www.rte.ie/brainstorm/2020/0811/1158475-skull-measuring-head-hunter-alfred-haddon-history-ireland/

‘Why does Kerry have a lower rate of Covid-19 than other counties’, RTÉ Brainstorm: https://www.rte.ie/brainstorm/2020/0928/1168032-kerry-covid-19-infections-blood-type-anthropology/

2020

‘The Victorian curator who railed against racism and imperialism‘. Irish Independent, June 20: 10: https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/the-victorian-curator-who-railed-against-racism-and-imperialism-39297723.html

Abstracts

Permission of the Royal Irish Academy © RIA.

A. C. Haddon: A very English savage (in Ireland)

Commissioned by Berghahn books in 2021, this book challenges the common sense that Anglo-Irish anthropology was something the Anglo did to the Irish in the name of science and the interest of British rule in the oldest colony at a time of unprecedented instability. Going against the grain of such arguments, I propose that Haddon, inspired by his anti-slavery grandparents and socialist aunts, assumed the persona of a very English savage and reinvented ethnography to challenge the atavistic racism that allowed colonists destroy other civilisations in territories annexed by imperial forces, including Ireland.

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With permission of Ulster Folk and Transport Museum ©

Anarchy in the UK: Haddon and the anarchist agenda in the Anglo-Irish folklore movement

Q1. What connects this photo of girls performing a singing game in a hillside village outside Belfast in 1893 with the first experimental use of cinematography to record the last performance of a dance on the Island of Mer in the Torres Strait five years later?

Q2. What has this got to do with BREXIT?

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Public History | Journalism

Finding little known collections and related archives and translating both into public histories has put www.curator.ie in the forefront of a shift towards public engagement that characteristises a decade of remembering the events that led to the foundation of the Irish state a century ago. My current research may predate the period under investigation, but the methods remain the same and using journalism to engage the public is a feature of the research-based, public history projects I have developed between 2010 and 2015.

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Unpublished material

The Skull Measuring Business (Doctoral Research) 2015 – 2020

Drawing on preliminary research for the “Irish Head-Hunter, this thesis represents a radical rewrite of the history of Anglo-Irish anthropology in Ireland and present a provocative assessment of what the means for anthropology in Ireland today as academics grapple with the fallout from a resurgent Black Lives Matter Movement.

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Latest News



TCD to announce return of ancestral remains to Inishbofin



Blogging resumes on Ballymaclinton: An Irish giant, 24 stolen skulls, one colonial legacies project and a slave owner named Berkeley.



Is the TCD statement on the stolen skulls of Inishbofin a missed opportunity?



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