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 Bouche (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 Bouche, 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.”
ECR Bursary 2025
Voices from the Irish Digital Humanities Community
DARIAH-IE ECR Bursary Awardees talk about their research.
We’re excited to present this special four-part blog series featuring insights from DARIAH-IE’s 2025 Early Career Researcher Bursary awardees.
DARIAH-IE was delighted to be able to support four Early Career Researchers to attend the DARIAH Annual Event, which took place in Göttingen, Germany in June 2025. The event was attended by 270 participants from across Europe, with numerous presentations, plus posters, over the course of the 3 days. As well as attending the event and benefiting from the networking and learning it offered, the awardees were given the opportunity to provide a short blog about their own work to share with fellow Irish Digital Humanities researchers on the DARIAH-IE website. These blog posts will be published fortnightly from September 11th.
The successful awardees are listed below, along with a brief bio, and link to their blog post.
Rachel McCarthy, PhD Researcher, University College Cork (CASCADE).
Rachel is a PhD researcher at University College Cork, where she previously earned a bachelor’s degree in ‘Digital Humanities and Information Technology’. After completing a master’s degree in ‘Digital Text Analysis’ at the University of Antwerp, she now focuses on computational literary studies. Her research involves using techniques such as stylometry, natural language processing, and language models to investigate authorship attribution and writing styles, and to track semantic changes in texts beyond traditional reading methods. Passionate about advancing text analysis, she aims to uncover new insights into literary and historical texts using digital methodologies.
Dr Caitlin Burge, Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Galway (STEMMA)
Caitlin (she/her) is a Postdoctoral Researcher with the ERC-project ‘STEMMA: Systems of Transmitting Early Modern Manuscript Verse, 1475-1700’, at the University of Galway, using quantitative and computational approaches to identify instances of ‘rolling archetypes’ and their evolution. Having completed her AHRC-funded PhD at Queen Mary, University of London in 2022, she is currently working on her first monograph using network analysis to consider the career of Thomas Cromwell and epistolary networks at the Tudor court, as well as a digital edition of Privy Council registers from the reign of Henry VIII. Recent articles can be found in Huntington Library Quarterly, Journal of Historical Network Research, and International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing.
Vera Yakupova, PhD Researcher, Trinity College Dublin (CLS INFRA)
Vera is a PhD researcher at Trinity College Dublin in the Digital Humanities department, focusing on privacy and surveillance in science fiction literature, working with traditional as well as digital methods in literary studies. Between 2022-2025, Vera Yakupova was a research assistant for the CLS INFRA (Computational Literary Studies Project) within Prof. Jennifer Edmond’s research group, based at the Centre for Digital Humanities at TCD. She obtained her MPhil in Modern and Contemporary Literary Studies at Trinity College Dublin (2021-2022) while expanding her research interest into the Digital Humanities and Computational Literary Studies. Her BA was in Interdisciplinary American Studies at the University of Tuebingen, Germany, where she worked as a research assistant at the department for English Literatures and cultures in Prof. Matthias Bauer’s and Prof. Angelika Zirker’s research group (2018-2021).
Dr Izzy Fox, Postdoctoral Researcher, Arts and Humanities Institute, Maynooth University (GEMINI)
Izzy is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Maynooth University in Ireland. She worked on the recently concluded GEMINI project, and before that on the AHRC and IRC-funded Full Stack Feminism project. In April 2025 Izzy was awarded seed funding by Maynooth University to develop a research project exploring the impact of SWERF and TERF online discourse and moral panics on the wellbeing of sex worker and trans communities in Ireland.
You can find most of the presentations and posters from the DARIAH-EU Annual Event 2025 ‘The Past’ in the DARIAH Community on Zenodo.
