Team

Dr Karen Dempsey

I am a currently a Government of Ireland, Irish Research Council funded Postdoctoral Fellow at the Dept of Archaeology, NUI Galway. My project 'Home is Where the Heart(h) is’ concentrates medieval houses in Ireland 1100-1600 AD. Using available but unexplored archaeological data, I will investigate ordinary medieval houses and households in Ireland to ask how people ‘made a house a home’? What things (objects) were used in the creation of households? How was daily-life structured and experienced? I was previously a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the Dept of Archaeology, University of Reading. My project, entitled HERSTORY challenged male-orientated views of the medieval world (so typical of castle-studies) which have largely excluded the everyday experiences and lives of people, especially women. Essentially, the project ambitions were wrapped up in telling the story of medieval people through the things that they used and cared about, within the spaces they inhabited, through the lens of what we know of the medieval past. This project paved the way for 'Home is Where the Heart(h) is'.

Dr Fiona MacGowan

Dr MacGowan is a Consulting Ecologist based in Co. Laois, working both professionally and voluntarily in the area of scientific habitat and wildlife assessments and environmental impact surveys for over fifteen years. She has worked both in the public and private sector on projects such as: the evaluation of proposed designated sites; preparing management plans for designated sites; the restoration and management of peatland habitats; baseline ecological surveys and ecological assessments of various developments. She is a keen historian and folklorist; her ecological reports benefit enormously from these interests.