Dr. Patrick Lonergan receives ‘New Ideas’ award from the IRCHSS

Dr. Patrick Lonergan of the Moore Institute and the School of Humanities has received a ‘New Idea’s award from the Irish Research Council for the Humanities & Social Sciences for his project ‘Performance, Nation and Modernisation: Cultural Encounters in Early Twentieth-Century Europe’ This project aims to develop a European network of scholars who will collaborate on a project entitled Performance, Nation and Modernisation: Cultural Encounters in Early Twentieth-Century Europe with a view to submitting a bid for HERA JRP funding under the theme of “Cultural Encounters” in May 2012. The network currently comprises four Irish partners, one UK partner and one partner in Finland. The broader project analyses the impact of cultural mobility on the formation of European identities between 1890 and 1935, by accounting for the interactions between emergent national movements and popular transnational cultures across Europe. Its major hypothesis is that aspects of European and national identity are played out, challenged, and defined in distinctive ways in both äóÖnational’ theatre movements and popular theatrical entertainments, both of which are deeply embedded in transnational cultural flows. Comparative studies will analyse how both the emergent national theatre traditions and popular entertainments in the early twentieth century were matched and influenced by the growth of mass communications and technological change. The project will thus map and model cultural flows, clarifying and renewing our understanding of the relationships between the national and international, the individual and the state, performance and ideology, the popular and the literary, and modernity and tradition.