Visualising Hibernia in Ireland, c.1770 - c.1930

Changing political relations between Ireland, Northern Ireland, and the United Kingdom, and the attendant prospect of a united Ireland, have given rise to lively debate within political and public spheres on the capacity of Ireland’s national symbols to represent pluralist notions of Irish identity.

Concurrently, the UK’s decision to leave the European Union has led to shifts in how Irish and Northern Irish citizens identify with the EU.

Responding to such developments, ‘Visualising Hibernia’ 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.

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.

It will be conducted under the supervision of Prof.

Lynda Mulvin, an expert on classical antiquity and its reception, at UCD, a leading institute for research on Irish political and cultural history.

It will result in a minimum of three peer-reviewed articles, an online multimedia exhibition, and communication activities including a podcast series.