U2, slavery in the Ottoman Empire, the Belfast Agreement, Goethe, Isadora Duncan, the Emperor Julian, the 1798 rebellion, British landscape artists in Naples and the Victorian crisis of faith - what do they all have in common?
It's simple - they're all topics of postgraduate research about which papers will be presented during UCD's arts faculty "postgraduate research day" programme.
Some 16 postgraduate students from the faculty of arts have been chosen to present their papers at the colloquium tomorrow week, March 3rd. This year, disciplines represented include the history of art, music, philosophy, English, statistics, Irish studies, German, linguistics, classics, history and Anglo-Irish studies. According to Professor Fergus D'Arcy, dean of the faculty of arts, the colloquium gives students the chance to communicate the results of their work to a wider audience, often for the first time. Postgraduate students are also invited to submit papers to Pages - Postgraduate Research in Progress, which is published annually by the faculty. Pages 98 will be officially launched at next week's colloquium.
According to D'Arcy, there are some 1,500 students engaged in postgraduate studies in the faculty. One-third of them are non-UCD graduates, he says, and half of these come from abroad. "The Anglo-Irish literature programme is particularly attractive to overseas students," he says. "We have always had the American market, but my impression is that increasing numbers are coming from Europe to study Anglo-Irish literature."
The National Folklore Collection, which is housed in UCD, is an attraction for some students, while for one Norwegian student at least, UCD was the only university which could offer professional supervision of a study of Viking Dublin, D'Arcy says.
Age is no barrier to postgraduate studies, the dean of arts says. "We get quite a number of mature students who come back late in life to pursue an interest," he says.
Does age make any differences? "Not in the sense that it may bar people from admission; indeed, in some respects it can be a help. Mathematicians, for example, tell us that they can teach very young people to be brilliant at maths. However, you cannot be good at history in your pre-teens - you need to know what's life's about. "An older person makes a better biographer than a young person."
At postgraduate level, the attrition rate is low - students tend to stick with their programmes. "The success rate in taught master's degree programmes is almost 100 per cent," he says.
At doctoral level, though, things are more problematic. Ideally, PhDs should be completed in three years, but many doctoral students have full-time jobs and take longer. "Some students take on subjects which are less tractable, and personal circumstances also play a part," D'Arcy notes.
However, finding insufficient material to complete your postgraduate programme is less of a catastrophe than you might think. "It can be frustrating but it's not ground lost. It does mean though that your research can be delayed. "It happened to me twice," D'Arcy recalls. "I wanted to study labour history, specifically 1913, but I couldn't get enough material representing both sides. I retained the theme, but went back to the early 19th century and I looked at English and Irish radicals. Parliamentary commissions of enquiry proved good sources of documentation, but I later switched to a mid-19th century political biography, where sources were even stronger."
An element of risk is a vital ingredient in such research. "If you set out and it's absolutely certain that the subject is do-able, then it's not worth doing. It's probably been done before. Too many people have said too much and there may be no new sources available. There's no challenge."
The role of the supervisor in postgraduate studies is crucial, D'Arcy says. "It's very important that we avoid the proliferation of short-term contracts in universities. You need long-term scholars to advise and be there for postgraduate students, to enable them to avoid the pitfalls of an unsuitable subject." Over the period of study, supervisors should spend "several hours per week" with each postgraduate student, he says. "On a two-year master's, a student should consult the supervisor regularly during the early stages. Then you can leave students to their own devices. "They have to do the work. Towards the end of the programme the contact becomes more intensive."
