ECR Bursary 2026
We are delighted to announce the successful recipients of the DARIAH-IE 2026 ECR Bursary:
Diaa Lagan (Department of Media Studies at Maynooth University and IADT), Dr Ellen Scally (Department of Film & Screen Media, University College Cork), Guang Yang (Department of Digital Arts and Humanities, University College Cork and Vicky Bouché (School of Education at Trinity College Dublin).
All of the awardees will receive financial support to attend the 2026 DARIAH Annual Event, which this year takes place in Rome. As part of their award they will be given the opportunity to share a short blog post after the event, with these posts being published here in the coming months.
Diaa Lagan, PhD Researcher, Maynooth University and IADT
Diaa Lagan is a multidisciplinary artist and PhD candidate in a joint programme between the Department of Media Studies at Maynooth University and IADT, funded by the Elevate Programme (co-funded by the Government of Ireland and the European Union through the ERDF Southern, Eastern and Midland Regional Programme 2021–27). His practice engages metaphorical narratives grounded in mythology and history. His doctoral research, Decolonial Counter-Mapping in Extended Reality, examines how immersive technologies, including virtual reality and mixed-media installation, function as practice-based worldbuilding methods that challenge dominant Western epistemologies of representation, spatial knowledge, and narrative.
Dr Ellen Scally, Postdoctoral Researcher, University College Cork
Ellen Scally recently graduated with a PhD from the Department of Film & Screen Media at University College Cork. She is a former graduate of the MA in Film & Screen Media at UCC. Her PhD project concerned the history of amateur film and cine-culture in Ireland, and research interests include Irish cinema history, amateur film practice, community cinema, and the audio-visual archive. Her PhD project was awarded an Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholarship and, in 2025, she was a fellow at the Centre for Advanced Internet Studies in Bochum, Germany. She is a co-organiser of Haunted Futures, an annual interdisciplinary conference at University College Cork.
Guang Yang, MA Student, University College Cork
Guang Yang is an MA student in Digital Arts and Humanities at University College Cork. His research applies multimodal computational methods to historical botanical works, focusing on the visual and material structures of illustrated knowledge. His poster, “Phyto-Vision: A Reproducible Workflow for the Computational Excavation of Global Botanical Iconography”, has been accepted for presentation at the DARIAH Annual Event 2026. His work examines how botanical images shaped the circulation and organisation of knowledge across global traditions, engaging debates around visual epistemology and data modelling in digital humanities. He develops computational workflows using computer vision, vision–language models, and visual analytics to analyse and interpret large collections of digitised illustrations.
Vicky Bouché, PhD Researcher, Trinity College Dublin
Vicky is a PhD candidate in the School of Education at Trinity College Dublin, where her research centres on how Generative AI-supported feedback can enhance student-teacher relationships in multilingual and multicultural classrooms. With a background as a secondary school French and Spanish teacher, she holds a Professional Master of Education and a Master’s in French Language and Literature, and has a strong interest in Second Language Acquisition, educational technology, and inclusive curriculum design. She is particularly interested in how technology can empower more equitable and responsive learning environments, guided by the belief that “technology is most powerful when it brings people closer to learning—and to each other.”
