In collaboration with Professor Christine Casey and the Department of History of Art in TCD, we are delighted to welcome Dr Greg Sullivan to Christ Church on a Long Room Hub Short Term Fellowship, to enable him to continue and expand his work on the Christ Church monuments collection.
In 2024 we embarked on a project to research the monuments in the Cathedral and invited Dr Sullivan to speak on the
tangled histories of these works to a closed seminar in February, and a public lecture in October. Following positive feedback on these sessions, Dr Sullivan has returned for a concentrated period of research and collaboration (from 1st September – 31st October 2025). The project will draw together imperial history, church history, art history, military history and the history of materiality, and engage with the public discourse on contested history and colonial history in monumental art.
The project will use the RCB archives, secondary sources and visual analysis to amass a body of knowledge about the creation and reception of the monuments. This research will be used to address the central issue of how to understand funerary artworks produced within a military and imperial context, or produced to commemorate British forces and administrators in Ireland, and how to present them to modern diverse audiences.
During the course of his residency, Dr Sullivan will offer a research seminar/fellow in focus session and a master class in Trinity, and work on cataloguing our monuments to make his research publicly accessible. He will also collaborate on the transformation of his findings into an interpretation scheme at the cathedral. Community partnership trails will also be developed from Dr Sullivan’s work, in conjunction with local secondary school students and/or relevant community groups, in order to engage a wider, diverse audience with the interesting questions about the cathedral’s heritage that his work will inevitably raise.