Ronan Kennedy (MSt, BA)
Thesis title: Working Title: Borderland Ballads: Soundscape and the Alternative Urban Imagination in Belfast and East Berlin from Post-Punk to Present
PhD supervisors:
Background
While custom seems to dictate I write in the third person, that feels a tad alienating, so I'll opt for the less professional grammatical fiction. I grew up in the US within an Irish diaspora family, which means I grew up with a sense of history that reached far deeper in the past than 1776. After fumbling my way through high school with my only real interest being the past, I seemed to have developed a brain by the time I graduated from the University of Montana in 2019 with Highest Honors (Summa Cum Laude) in two Bachelor's Degrees: History and German Language and Literature. After volunteering for development work with the Peace Corps in North Macedonia (and getting prematurely evacuated due to Covid-19), I completed two years of a Language Assistantship in Vienna through Fulbright Austria and the Austrian Education Ministry.
Realising I couldn't put off further schooling anymore, I undertook a Master of Studies at the University of Oxford, using the 9 Months allotted to me at Hertford College to pursue original Oral Histories of Derry's Troubles-era punk scene. This experience led me to see much of my current interests are in the history of the material space of the city and the dialectical relationship it shares with our senses, imagination, and experiences. In short, I might be a semiotician masquerading in the clothes of a historian and it's too late to turn around so here we are. After being awarded the Justin Arbuthnott PhD Scholarship in Modern Irish-British History and graduating in the summer of 2024, I moved to Edinburgh to undertake full-time PhD Study handling this very matter, and have chosen to compare two cities I love: Belfast and Berlin. In comparing and contrasting how both cities' alternative music scenes have engaged with and navigated these two distinctly divided environments, I hope to provide insight on the ambiguities, frustrations, and complexities of life in the modern European city and the obstacles to forging a more inclusive right to our urban spaces.
Qualifications
MSt Modern British History, Hertford College, University of Oxford (2024) - Distinction
BA in History, University of Montana, (2019) - Summa Cum Laude
BA in German Language and Literature, University of Montana (2019) - Summa Cum Laude
Responsibilities & affiliations
I am a Postgraduate member of the British Association for Irish Studies, the German History Society, the Royal Historical Society, the UK Oral History Society, and the Royal Musical Assocation.
Undergraduate teaching
I am currently a tutor for the second year course Introduction to Historiography (HIST08044) and The History of Edinburgh (HIST08036).
Research summary
On the broadest levels, I would describe my interests overall as urban history, musical history, intellectual history, historical semiotics, the history of Modernity, European history (and how we approach the concept of "Europe"), Irish history, and German History.
My current research works at an intersection of cultural, political, and social history, with a particular focus on urban history and methods for capturing and understanding urban modernity and the idea of the city. As my past training works in the European historical field, I have chosen to focus my current efforts on a comparison of how Belfast and East Berlin's alternative music scenes have engaged with the spatial segregation of their urban environments since the post-punk boom of the 1980s and the everyday strategies used to navigate the shifting goalposts of hegemony to define competing alternative visions of the "right to the city."
This does not preclude further work in the future on other divided environments or the power dynamics at play in them - equally of interest to me is the concept of sectarianism itself, which I feel is a concept in desperate need of further theorization and historicization. I am additionally interested in how power is exercised in the urban environment, and how it is distributed in ethno-linguistically, ethno-religiously, or economically divided territories, such as Montreal, Sarajevo, Novi Sad, Singapore, Baghdad, Nicosia, Jerusalem, or indeed, Washington D.C., an interest that will likely lend itself to future collaborative work on these environments.