University of Limerick academic receives funding for ‘curiosity-driven’ frontier research

An academic at the University of Limerick has received funding for ground-breaking research under the Irish Research Council’s Consolidator Laureate Awards Programme.

Dr Richard Kirwan, Lecturer in History and former Director of the Centre for Early Modern Studies, was among the awardees to receive a total investment of almost €24 million in ‘curiosity-driven’ frontier research announced today by Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science Simon Harris. Dr Kirwan’s project, awarded under the humanities panel, is ‘Malcontents: Order and Disorder in the Early Modern World of Learning’. The Laureate programme encompasses two streams of funding, namely ‘starting’ funding for early-career researchers who are to receive €400,000 each and ‘consolidator’ funding for mid-career researchers who are to receive €600,000 each.

Dr Richard Kirwan, Lecturer in History and former Director of the Centre for Early Modern Studies, was among the awardees to receive a total investment of almost €24 million in ‘curiosity-driven’ frontier research announced today by Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science Simon Harris. Dr Kirwan’s project, awarded under the humanities panel, is ‘Malcontents: Order and Disorder in the Early Modern World of Learning’.

The Laureate programme encompasses two streams of funding, namely ‘starting’ funding for early-career researchers who are to receive €400,000 each and ‘consolidator’ funding for mid-career researchers who are to receive €600,000 each.

Dr Kirwan is to receive consolidator funding and his project examines the nature and experience of social marginality in the universities of the Holy Roman Empire and the Low Countries in the early modern period. He explained: “The project explores how academic communities and ruling authorities defined and responded to deviance arising from a) intellectual heterodoxy and b) social nonconformity. It thus interrogates the importance of the identification and suppression of deviance in the substantiation of order in the early modern university and beyond.”

Announcing the awards, Minister Harris said: “I am delighted to announce the winners of the second round of the Irish Research Council’s Starting and Consolidator Laureate Awards Programme and I congratulate each of the awardees. “These talented researchers will no doubt contribute hugely towards the world-class excellence that is the bedrock of our research system in Ireland, pushing the boundaries of research knowledge and finding new discoveries that deepen our understanding of the world around us, by looking to the past, questioning the present, and unlocking our future potential.”

Also commenting, Dr Louise Callinan, Director of the Irish Research Council, said: “The 48 researchers who will receive funding under the Starting and Consolidator Laureate Awards Programme have the potential to make ground-breaking advances in their respective fields and to bolster Ireland’s competitiveness in European research funding. “This is the second round of Laureate funding and many of the first-round awardees will be completing their research next year. It is testament to the success of the programme that three of the first-round awardees have already gone on to receive European Research Council funding, one as part of Ireland’s first ERC Synergy grant worth €10 million. “The winning projects were awarded on the basis solely of excellence, and applications were assessed through a rigorous and independent international peer-review process.”

Further information about the Laureate Awards is available at www.research.ie.