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The Irish Borderlands project

This website is based on a three year research project entitled ‘Irish border/lands: cultural geographies of division, interconnection and diversity’ funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK and completed in 2008. The project explored the historical geography of the border between Northern Ireland and Ireland from its beginning in the early 1920s to the present day. It did so by addressing three interconnected themes: the geography of the border in terms of its physical presence in the landscape; the meaning of the border; and the experiences of those who have lived on or close to the border. These themes were also explored through a focus on the ways the border and its effects have differed over time and have varied along its length.

The research has been published as a book: Nash, C., Reid, B. and Graham, B. J (2013) Partitioned Lives: The Irish Borderlands, Farnham. Ashgate.

This website presents some of the project’s research and draws on other published materials on the Irish border. We fully acknowledge the important work of others in this field whose work is listed in the Links and Resources section. We are also very grateful to Robert Lamrock of the UTV for his great generosity in letting us include still images and footage from the UTV film archive and to Donovan Wylie for permission to reproduce two photographs from his British Watchtowers (Steidl, 2007).

The research was jointly led by Professor Brian Graham (University of Ulster) and Professor Catherine Nash (Queen Mary, University of London), with the help of Dr Elizabeth Crooke (University of Ulster), and conducted by Dr Bryonie Reid and Dr Lorraine Dennis, with the technical support of Dr Amanda McMullan, at the University of Ulster. The first version of the Borderlands website was designed by John McCandless, with the technical support of Richard Taylor and devised by Catherine Nash. We are very grateful to all the project team, to our Advisory Board - Helen Lanigan Wood, Brian Turner, Roddy Hegarty, Maurna Crozier, Patrick Duffy, Ian Gregory and Seamus O Cathain - to the AHRC for awarding us the funding to undertake this research and for further funding for its dissemination, to Marty Melarkey, Director of the Nerve Centre, for his enthusiastic support for the project from its earliest stages. This new version of the website has been developed by the Directorate of Marketing and Communications, Queen Mary, University of London.

If you have any comments on this website or would like contribute to our research please contact:

Professor B. J. Graham,
School of Environmental Sciences
University of Ulster
Cromore Road
Coleraine
BT52 1SA, UK
email: bj.graham@ulster.ac.uk

Professor Catherine Nash,
Department of Geography
Queen Mary, University of London
Mile End Road
London
E1 4NS, UK
email: c.nash@qmul.ac.uk