Projects

Alfred Cort Haddon, A Very English Savage is also a book about photography and it pivots on Haddon’s discovery of ‘instantaneous’ or social documentary photography in the Aran Islands in 1890. I argue that this led to an experiment in...

  9/10/2024  @ 21:30   Iarsmaí features the closing stages of a long campaign to persuade the School of Medicine in Trinity College Dublin (TCD) to return for burial the remains of thirteen individuals stolen from the island in 1890. Marie Coyne...

The opening of a grave in a community burial ground marks the end of a ten-year campaign seeking the return and burial of the ‘stolen skulls’ of Inishbofin. Community representatives will remove the remains of their ancestors from the ‘Old‘ Anatomy...

Kerry Writers' Museum has constructed a camera obscura so that people can experience what it is like to be inside a camera. Curators drilled a hole in a shutter on a window overlooking the square in Listowel and an image of St. John's Theatre and...

In 2020, TCD announced plans to deal with its colonial legacy and we asked Provost Paddy Prendergast if he had heard of the stolen skulls held in TCD. The repatriation of these remains would, we proposed, be a good way to start decolonising the...

    Inishbofin Heritage Museum presents 'Returning Home’, an outdoor exhibition of photographs taken in Inishbofin 1893. The aim is to add living faces to the anthropological collection of human remains that Trinity College, University of Dublin...

In 2007, Ciarán Walsh discovered an album of John Millington Synge’s photographs that Lilo Stephen’s published on the centenary of his death in 1971. He tracked the original negatives to TCD, and Felicity O’Mahony in the Manuscript Library arranged...

‘Haddon and the Aran Islands’ opens in the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI) on 15 October 2023. The exhibition features twenty five photographs that are organised around a slideshow Haddon presented in 1890 and titled ‘The Aran Islands’. It...

  Gearóid Cheaist Ó Catháin, the last child to live on the Great Blasket Island, with Dáithí de Mórdha, The Great Blasket Centre,  in front of a photograph of Gearóid with his Grandfather Maurice Mhuiris Ó Catháin, taken by Dan...

Folk is an oral history of the folk theatre movement that developed in County Kerry in the 1960s and thrived for over three decades.This project has been developed in partnership with Pat Ahern, the leader of that movement. I have recorded a long...

Donegal County Council Archives Service acquired a collection of photographs by Ann Doherty in 2018. Doherty worked as a photojournalist with the Sunday Times Magazine between 1994 and 2005 and documented ordinary people living in extraordinary...

The Skull Measuring Business (2015 – 2020)   A miscellany of murderous little facts from the hidden spaces of anthropology in Ireland: Some Background   Ciarán Walsh set up curator.ie in 2010 following the international success of his exhibition...