Graduate Student, History
Thesis Title: The History and Collective Memory of Irish Support for the Spanish Second Republic
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Dr Donal Ó Drisceoil
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About
I am a PhD candidate in the School of History at University College Cork. My primary research interest is that of working class and oppressed groups in history. Under this umbrella, I am more specifically interested in political ideology and organisation, ie socialism, communism, trade unionism, the theory and practice of revolution, etc.; the development of working class, minority and ethnic identity, culture, tradition and memory. This includes the study of nationalism, diaspora, literature, media, etc. Central to all of this is the complex interaction between the state, the working class and other groups in society.
I am also interested in historiography and at the moment, am particularly interested in the theory and practice of oral history, and the application of memory studies to history.
My PhD thesis aims to explore the history and collective memory of Irish support for the Spanish Second Republic during the Spanish Civil War. This entails a prosopographical study of the volunteers for the International Brigades in particular, but also other groups such as medical aid workers, and volunteers for the Anarchist and POUM militias. The trajectories of the volunteers will be charted and compared by age, location, political and social background among other things. Most of the source material for this part of the study is archival.
Furthermore, the memory of the Spanish Civil War in Ireland will be explored. The first two parts in this section will examine the private memory of the SCW. This will entail an examination of memoirs, interviews, letters and other material from volunteers. This will be followed by an exploration of the memory of the families of the volunteers, primarily based on letters and interviews. The final part will explore the public memory of the SCW in Ireland through an exploration of film, literature (poems, novels, newspaper articles, etc), the historiography, and primarily through the study of monuments to the SCW in Ireland and to Irish volunteers in Spain. This will discuss how the process of memorialisation ties in with the changing political and socio-economic situation in Ireland and in Spain.
I am currently the holder of a Government of Ireland scholarship from the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences.
Previous awards are:
UCC Dept of History, Michael Joseph McEnery Prize 2009
UCC College of Arts, Celtic Studies and Social Sciences PhD Scholarship 2008
UCC College Scholar 2004
I graduated with a BA in History and Archaeology from UCC in 2006 for which I received a first class honours.
