Ruth Byrne
PhD studentThesis Title
The current (working) title of my thesis is:
‘Attitudes to Migrants in the 19th Century: Using very large historical corpora for socio-historical research’
Profile
My thesis uses corpus linguistics; the machine-assisted analysis of language in very large bodies of text, to examine attitudes towards immigrants and refugees in nineteenth century newspapers. It is part of an ESRC Studentship in collaboration with the British Library. The aim of the project is not simply to answer a historical research question, but to provide a case study for what large digital corpora can offer to historians.
Affiliated with CASS (Corpus Approaches to the Social Sciences)
My research interests include:
- corpus linguistics
- digital humanities
- migration studies
- immigration
- refugees
- nineteenth century Britain
- digitisation
- media history
- the press
Research Grants
ESRC CASE Studentship in Collaboration with the British Library.
Additional Information
Conferences, workshops, and symposiums:
- ‘Anarchical firebrands and murderers […] in their London Dens’: Testing the limit of British ‘tolerance’, ‘Foreigner’ in Britain Conference, King’s College, London 2017.
- ‘The Language of Immigration in the Victorian Press: A Historian’s Perspective on Corpus Linguistics’, Invited speaker at the ‘Corpus Research in Linguistics and beyond’ seminar series, King’s College, London 2017.
- ‘The Language of Immigration in the Victorian Media’, Invited speaker at the ‘Feed the Mind’ public seminar series, British Library, London, 2016.
- ‘A Corpus Approach to the Discourses of Migration’, Social Science History Association Conference (SSHA), Chicago, 2016.
- ‘A Historian’s Perspective on Context and Corpora’, IVACS Conference, Bath, 2016.
- ‘Aliens, Foreigners and Migrants: a corpus approach to attitudes towards immigrant groups using the British Library’s nineteenth century newspaper collection’, Social History Society Conference, Lancaster University, 2016.
Current Teaching
I currently teach on HIST100 'From the Medieval to the Modern'.
I am also a writing tutor at the FASS Academic Writing Space.
I am an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.