Formed by the disciplines of Sociology, Womens Studies, Community Development and History, I am an interdisciplinary scholar who combines the social sciences and the humanities in my research and leadership work. LEADERSHIP: I have embraced leadership opportunitiesthroughout my career in the university to includeHead of School of Political Science and Sociology (2013-2017), Acting Head of School (2019-2020), Vice Dean Faculty of Arts (2000-2003) and founder member of the UCG Womens Studies Centre (1989-1992). I served as Vice-President of the Sociological Association of Ireland for two terms (2013-2016) (1988-1990), served as editor of the Irish Journal of Sociology (1995, 1996) and editor of the UCG Womens Studies Review (1992, 1993). I actively engage in collaborative scholarship with community, voluntary and arts based bodies.RESEARCH: My researchexpertise is in social identities, lived experience, narrative inquiry and archival scholarship. Working with the lesser known stories of ordinary (and sometimes well known) people provokes a consideration of how individual lives, culture and history intersect. Understood as social stories they can offer insight into Irish identities and relations with others and who we are in the present moment.Previous researchfocussed on the lives and experiences of single women, poverty and inequality, rural womens lives andwomen and farming. Narratives of Ireland is a multi-perspectival thematic project on the formation of Irish Lives and Identities from a gender, family and community perspective, focusing on individual biography and community histories. NARRATIVES OF IRELAND AND THE UK2018-2022:IRISH-BLOOMSBURY CONNECTIONS. Irish-UK exchanges prior to the formation of the state are a current preoccupation and expressed in two book projects. Virginia and Leonard Woolfs Irish Tour (1934) based on a critical edition of diaries and letters (book due 2022). See Byrne, Anne and Gosling, Paul. 2018. Remnants of Mr. and Mrs. Woolfs Visit to Ireland in 1934, Virginia Woolf Bulletin , 59:24-32. 2. The correspondences of Nancy Nolan and Leonard Woolf . This project concerns the long term correspondences (1943-1968) of Nancy Nolan, Irish woman and Leonard Woolf, English man, publisher, political theorist, civil servant and husband to Virginia Woolf. The exchange of letters describes the life of a married woman working in the home, raising children, with a passion for books and reading and a man interested in encouraging the life of the mind. (In preparation). SeeByrne, A. 20142015 A Passion for Books: The early letters of Nancy Nolan to Leonard Woolf (1943-1944) Virginia Woolf Miscellany , No 86, Fall 2014Winter 2015, pp32-34, Southern Connecticut State University, USA. a target=_blank rel=nofollow href=https:mail.nuigalway.ieowaredir.aspx?C=go3WRjuSaEKtk8n0sXiZ_8zWwqmZcNII4zlrWrsQhKQ4iGK_qTofDKrjKzt6dT9xtP6rMVSGAKw. amp;URL=https%3a%2f%2fvirginiawoolfmiscellany.wordpress.com%2fvirginia-woolf-miscellany-fall-2014winter-2015-issue-86https:virginiawoolfmiscellany.wordpress.comvirginia-woolf-miscellany-fall-2014winter-2015-issue-86 NARRATIVES OF IRELAND AND THE US 2018-2021 THE HARVARD-IRISH SURVEY, IRELAND AND AMERICA . This is a 3-phase participatory project with Public - No restrictionations, exhibition and media outputs with a focus on the 1930s social anthropological study of Ireland conducted by Harvard academics. One of the Public - No restrictionations, Family and Community in Ireland (1940) by Conrad Arensberg and Solon Kimball is not only a classical account of a changing rural society in the 1930s, but has become a standard reference for understanding the agricultural family system and the social mechanisms that sustained a traditional form of family life with its benefits, costs, conflicts and consequences for economy, society and individuals. WHAT IS THE HARVARD-IRISH SURVEY, 1930-1936(1998-2007)Part of an all-Ireland archaeological and anthropological study of a modern nation conducted by academics from Harvard University, the Harvard-Irish Survey, had three strands: archaeology, physical anthropology and social anthropology. Almost nine decades later the story of the Harvard-Irish Survey continues to raise issues concerning the import of scholarly studies on narratives of Ireland, Irishness and the shaping of cultural or national identities. Family and Community in Ireland was one product of the comprehensive scientific description of a civilisation in the process of dynamic change.SeeAnne Byrne, Ricca Edmondson and Tony Varley, 2001, Arensberg and Kimball and Anthropological Research in Ireland: Introduction to the Third Edition, Conrad Arensberg and Solon Kimball, Family and Community in Ireland, CLASP: Ireland, pp1-101. SUCCESSORS MEET PREDECESSORS(2008-2016) The contribution of family, kin, and community relations in sustaining a rural way of life was the primary focus of Arensberg and Kimballs study of Irish farm families. Through the frame of a collaborative community research project with the descendants of the families written about, I invited contemporary farm families to read Kimballs 1930s field diary which contained direct references to forbears (Successors Meet Predecessors, Rinnamona Research Group). This locally based collaboration provided an opportunity for community members to remember the laboring and family lives of ancestors while telling their own stories of farming, family and community in the 21st century. Importantly it provided an opportunity forsuccessors to engage with the first hand anthropological accounts concerning theirforbears and work withremaining sensitivities post the original Public - No restrictionation of Family and Community in Ireland (1940).Deploying a narrative inquiry approach, the power of local stories to interrupt dominant narratives of family and community became the theme for Phase 2 of the project.SeeByrne, Anne, and OMahony, Deirdre, 2013Revisiting and Reframing the Anthropological Archive, Irish Journal of Anthropology 16,1, 8-15.Byrne, Anne and OMahony, Deirdre, 2012 Family and Community; (Re)telling our own story. Journal of Family issues 33, 1, 52-75.SHARING THE GIFT: THE HARVARD-IRISH SURVEY MANUSCRIPTSIN THE US and Ireland (2018-2021)The aim of the present phase of the project, Sharing the Gift is to collate and publish the Irish and US archivalmaterial and to workon the unpublished Harvard-Irish Survey records, manuscripts, fieldwork diaries and letters, in the USIrelandwhile communicating the story to a larger American and IrishPublic - No restriction. Publishing the primary source material in the interests ofPublic - No restriction scholarship and general interestis a remit of this phase of theproject. See Byrne, A. and OSullivan, E. 2019. Arensberg, Kimball and de Valera: A story of sex and censorship in Irish Journal of Sociology. 1-24.Byrne, Anne 2017. Epistolary research relations: correspondences in anthropological research - Arensberg, Kimball and the Harvard-Irish Survey 1930- 1936 in OGiollain, D. (ed), Irish Ethnologies , Notre Dame University Press: USA, 58-87.

Dr Anne Byrnes research interests concern the culture and history of Irish society in the 20th century, with Public - No restrictionationson identity, single women and the social anthropology of the Irish family. Anne is a foundermember of the Narrative Studies Group andInternational Narrative Inquiry Conferences(2014, 2015, 2016, 2018).Current research interests are with photographs, diaries and letters of family and community life in Ireland in the early to mid-twentieth century.Narratives of Ireland concerns anthropological and biographical work on the archives and manuscriptsof (1) Irish-Bloomsbury Connectionsand(2)The Harvard-Irish Mission to Irelandin the early years of the Irish state.

My teaching is animated by active involvement in research, through participating and contributing to community development work and through professional development and training. My teaching interests are in collaborative, critical and creative research methodologies (eg socio-biography, visual ethnography, narrative inquiry, art, archives and documents of life); group work for professional community development workers; the sociology of Ireland; gender and autobiography.