Alumni engagement and philanthropy



LECTURER WINS TWO AWARDS FOR BOOK ON LATE MEDIEVAL IRELAND

12 April 2019

Dr Sparky Booker, a member of staff in the School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics at Queen’s, recently picked up two awards from the American Conference for Irish Studies for her book Cultural Exchange and Identity in Late Medieval Ireland.

A lecturer in Irish Medieval History, Dr Booker joined the University in autumn 2016 before which she was a Research Fellow at Swansea University. Dr Booker spent two years at Swansea as part of a team on the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded project ‘Women negotiating the boundaries of justice’, a comparative historical study across Britain and Ireland.

There her research examined the position of women in the courts of the English colony of late medieval Ireland, assessing how they went about pursuing justice in both ecclesiastical and secular courts and how successful they were in doing so.

Dr Booker has particular interests in identities and cultural exchange, urban history, and in the experiences of marginalised groups that have been underrepresented in histories of medieval Ireland. This includes the Irish inhabitants of the colony, women, and non-elites.

Regarded as a rising star in the field of Medieval Irish History, Dr Booker’s work explores the cultural interactions of the Irish and English in Ireland. Her PhD, which she completed at Trinity College Dublin in 2012, grappled with the issues of ancestry, legal status, language and customs in the construction of Englishness and Irishness in the colony. As an Irish Research Council postdoctoral fellow at Dublin in 2013, she was part of a project on cultural exchange in the city.

Cultural Exchange and Identity in Late Medieval Ireland examines the nature of interactions between English and Irish neighbours in the four shires, taking into account the complex tensions between assimilation and the preservation of distinct ethnic identities. It also explores how the common colonial rhetoric of the Irish as an 'enemy' coexisted with the daily reality of alliance, intermarriage, and accommodation.

Placing Ireland in a broad context, Dr Booker addresses the strategies the colonial community used to deal with the difficulties posed by extensive assimilation, and the lasting changes this made to understandings of what it meant to be 'English' or 'Irish' in the face of such challenges.

Founded in 1960, the American Conference for Irish Studies (ACIS) is a multidisciplinary scholarly organisation with membership numbering approximately 800 from the USA, Canada, Ireland and other countries around the world.

Dr Booker won the Donald Murphy Prize for Distinguished First Books and the James S Donnelly, Sr., Prize for Books on History and Social Sciences.

Don Murphy received his BEng (Electrical) degree and his BSc degree in Physics and Mathematics from Manhattan College in 1958. Like many of his generation he went to work in defence and in aerospace.

He left industry to work in biomedical research engineering where he was the assistant director of the department at Long Island College Hospital.

A musician and linguist, a champion sailor and enthusiastic skier, Dr Murphy was an avid if reluctant traveller who hated to be away from his lab. He believed that recognition often came too late for scholars, so when he died it was seen as fitting to honour his life with a prize that would recognize the first published book of young scholars.

James S Donnelly attended St Francis College in Brooklyn in the mid-1930s and received his Master’s and doctoral degrees from Fordham University. He joined the Fordham faculty in 1943 and rose to the rank of associate professor and director of graduate studies in the history department.

In 1973, he joined Bell Telephone Laboratories as an editor of scientific reports and retired from Bellcore, a Bell successor company, in 1986. He died in 1989 at the age of 73.

The James S. Donnelly, Sr., Prize, named in honour of this notable scholar, editor, and teacher, was first awarded in 1999.

Dr Booker is keen on engaging the public in academic research. While in Dublin, she co-founded a free public lecture series ‘Tales of Medieval Dublin’, which introduced its audience to 21 colourful characters who lived in the medieval city, and was published as a collection of biographical essays, Tales of Medieval Dublin. Over the past six years she has also provided free medieval walking tours of Dublin, helped to build ‘The Battle of Clontarf’ website, aimed at the general public, and contributed to many other activities as a member of the Friends of Medieval Dublin.

Outside of her research, Dr Booker is a keen sportswoman. She has been a member of the Irish national Ultimate Frisbee team since 2003, and is an avid fan of the Pittsburgh Steelers American football team.

Dr Sparky Booker can be contacted at the School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics at Queen’s, tel: +44 (0)28 9097 3880.

General enquiries about this news story can be directed to Gerry Power, Communications Officer, Development and Alumni Relations Office at Queen’s; tel: +44 (0)28 9097 5321.

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