The Irish Georgian Society is delighted to announce that the Desmond Guinness Scholarship 2021 has been jointly awarded to Deirdre Cullen and Siobhan Osgood.

Deirdre Cullen is a PhD student at University College Dublin where her thesis, the Long Gallery at Castletown: a rare example of the neoclassical taste for painted rooms 'all’antica' and an expression of the intellectual and cultural worlds of Ireland’s eighteenth-century elite, is being supervised by Dr Conor Lucey. Deirdre will use the DG Scholarship to help fund archival research in three UK archives (the British Library, the West Sussex Record Office and Suffolk Archives), as well as conduct site visits to key neoclassical interiors across England, from Heaton Hall in Manhcester to Fawley Court in Buckinghamshire. It is anticipated that the archival research and site visits will prove critical in informing Cullen’s comparative analysis of the Long Gallery within the genre of the painted room 'all’antica' and the wider genre of neoclassical painted decoration in Britain and Ireland.

Siobhan Osgood is a PhD student at Trinity College Dublin where her thesis, Architecture of the former Great Northern Railway of Ireland, is being supervised by Professor Christine Casey. William Hemingway Mills was the chief engineer for the GNRI but before this during the period 1865-69, he was engineer-in-chief for the Andalusian Railway in Spain where he constructed the Córdoba-Belmez line. Osgood wishes to explore this trans-national relationship of architectural styles and influences of engineering expansionism and its subsequent impact in an Irish context. The Desmond Guinness Scholarship will facilitate archival research at the Railway Historical Archive and Railway Library at the Museo del Ferrocarril in Madrid. The DG scholarship will also help fund Osgood’s site visits to the landmark railway stations of Atocha and Charmarrín and assist in funding Osgood’s travel along the Córdoba-Belmez line visiting the original stations, thus completing a comprehensive research trip into William Hemingway Mills and his work on the Andalusian Railway.

The Irish Georgian Society would like to take this opportunity to thank all those who applied for the scholarship in 2021. There was a notable number of high calibre applications.

The Society would also like to extend our gratitude to the Desmond Guinness Scholarship assessors (Professor Christine Casey, TCD; Associate Professor Alison FitzGerald, Maynooth University; Dr David Fleming, UL; Professor Kathleen James-Chakraborty, UCD; Associate Professor Conor Lucey, UCD; Dr Anna Moran, NCAD; and Primrose Wilson, OBE; ) for their generosity in sharing their academic expertise and investing their time in evaluating the applications.