DARIAH-IE Announces 2026 Bursary Recipients to Attend DARIAH Annual Event in Rome

[Image above by Diaa Lagan, Bursary Recipient]

Four Early Career Researchers from Ireland selected to participate in DARIAH Annual event

DARIAH-IE is delighted to announce the four recipients of its 2026 Early Career Researcher Bursary Scheme, which will support emerging Irish scholars to attend the DARIAH Annual Event, taking place in Rome, Italy from 26–29 May 2026. The theme of this year’s event is: Digital Arts and Humanities With and For Society: Building Infrastructures of Engagement.

This bursary initiative reflects DARIAH-IE’s ongoing commitment to fostering the development of Ireland’s digital arts and humanities communities by providing emerging scholars with invaluable opportunities for international networking and professional growth.

The DARIAH Annual Event brings together researchers, technologists, and cultural heritage professionals from across Europe for presentations, poster sessions, workshops, and networking opportunities that enable engagement with the latest developments in digital research methods, tools, and resources for the digitally-enabled arts and humanities.

Building on the success of last year’s programme, which supported four Irish researchers to attend the DARIAH Annual Event in Göttingen, Germany, this year’s bursary scheme will once again enable early career scholars to participate fully in this prestigious event. Following the conference, bursary recipients will be invited to contribute a short media piece — such as a blog post or interview — to be published on dariah.ie.

Meet the 2026 Bursary Recipients

Diaa Lagan

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.

Ellen Scally

Ellen Scally recently graduated with a PhD from the Department of Film & Screen Media at University College Cork, where she was also a graduate of the MA in Film & Screen Media. Her doctoral research concerned the history of amateur film and cine-culture in Ireland, and her interests span Irish cinema history, amateur film practice, community cinema, and the audio-visual archive. Her PhD 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. Ellen is also a co-organiser of Haunted Futures, an annual interdisciplinary conference at University College Cork.

Guang Yang

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, developing computational workflows using computer vision, vision–language models, and visual analytics to analyse large collections of digitised illustrations.

Vicky Bouche

Vicky Bouche 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. Her research engages with Second Language Acquisition, educational technology, and inclusive curriculum design, guided by the conviction that “technology is most powerful when it brings people closer to learning—and to each other.”

About DARIAH-IE

DARIAH-IE is the Irish national node of DARIAH (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities), a pan-European research infrastructure supporting digital research across the arts and humanities. DARIAH-IE supports Irish researchers to connect with a European network of expertise, tools, and resources. For more information, visit dariah.ie.

About the DARIAH Annual Event 2026

The DARIAH Annual Event is the flagship gathering of the DARIAH community, bringing together researchers, technologists, and cultural heritage professionals from across Europe and beyond. The 2026 event takes place in Rome, Italy, from 26–29 May, under the theme Digital Arts and Humanities With and For Society: Building Infrastructures of Engagement. For more information, visit the DARIAH website.