2023
’Normalising the Abnormal: Trinity College Dublin Decides what to do with its Collection of Stolen Skulls‘, AJEC (Anthropological Journal of European Cultures) Blog: Academic Research in the Anthropology of Europe:
Addendum: https://ajecblog.berghahnjournals.com/addendum-to-normalising-the-abnormal/
[In Production] Alfred Cort Haddon, a very English savage. Berghahn Books New York.
The fifth volume in a series on Anthropology’s Ancestors, Alfred Cort Haddon: A Very English Savage is an innovative account of one of the least-understood characters in the history of anthropology. Walsh regards most of what has been written about Haddon as a form of disciplinary folklore shaped by a theory of scientific revolutions. He uses previously overlooked, primary sources to argue that Haddon, the grandson of anti-slavery activists, set out to revolutionise anthropology in the 1890s in association with a network of anarcho-utopian activists and philosophers. The main action takes place in Ireland, where Haddon adopted the persona of a very English savage in a new form of performed photo-ethnography that constituted a singularly modernist achievement in anthropology.
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.
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?
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.
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.
