The Editors of British Naval History are thrilled to announce the results of the 2014 Alan Villiers Memorial Lecture Postgraduate Essay Contest.
Our esteemed panel of Judges, which included Justin Reay (British Naval History), Dr Vaughan Mitchell (British Naval Research Association), John Foreman (Alan Villiers Memorial Lecture), VAdm (Ret’d) Sir Jeremy Blackham (Naval Review), and Capt. Peter Hore have named Jerome Devitt, of Trinity College Dublin as the first winner of the contest.
Jerome is a second year PhD student, investigating the British and Irish Executive’s reaction to Transatlantic Fenianism in the late 1860s, under the supervision of Dr David Dickson and Dr Ciaran O’Neill. He views the defensive system in the light of recent developments in counter-insurgency practice and theory. His interdisciplinary research project will engage with aspects of military, naval, legal, diaspora, administrative, and transnational history. Of particular interest to his research project is the implementation of deterrent policies and their media reception. Of these policies, the use of the Royal Navy as an aid to the “civil power” is a key, and under-explored aspect of Irish and mid-Victorian historiography.
A Dublin native, and former junior national sailing champion, he was recently awarded an Irish Research Council – “Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholarship” that commenced in Autumn 2013. He also spent a portion of summer 2013 as a “Dobbin Scholar” of the Irish Canadian University Foundation, studying with Dr David A Wilson at the University of Toronto. He is a member of the “Transnational Ireland” research group, and the convener of the Trinity Postgraduate Student Seminar Series. Further information on his project can be found on his Academia profile. Jerome completed his Masters in Military History (Cum Laude) in Norwich University, Vermont, in 2009.
Jerome’s entry “Bluster on one side… Sound Preparation on the other” examines the Royal Navy’s involvement in the “deterrence and suppression of insurrectionary movements in Ireland between 1840 and 1870”.
Jerome will be presenting the Graduate Student Paper at the 2014 Alan Villiers Memorial Lecture, 1 October 2014 at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. Professor NAM Rodger of All Souls, Oxford will be provide the keynote lecture ‘The German Submarine War, 1914-1918′.
The Editors also thank Commander Hugues Canuel, Claudia Zanardi and Chris Menking for their excellent entries to the 2014 AVML Postgraduate Essay Contest.
