Richard S. Torpin was the 2015 recipient of the Larkin Research Fellowship in Irish Studies. Curious to see how his research work had gone, we checked in with him to hear an update on the progress of his project and the twists and turns that often accompany visits to the archives.

Thanks in part to the support I received from the Larkin fellowship, I was able to undertake a second research trip this past summer. This allowed me to complete the work I had originally began on my first trip to the archives and to tie up some loose ends that had emerged as my project evolved. As originally conceived, my planned dissertation was to examine politics in Ulster during the 1830s, particularly during the years of the second Melbourne government. As work progressed it became clear that there was much interesting work to be done on the social conditions of the period and the final form of my project has moved much more in that direction.

The main source base for my dissertation is the “outrage papers,” a subset of the Chief Secretary’s Office Registered Papers (CSORP), a massive collection held at the National Archives in Dublin. Arranged by county and year, they are more accessible than the rest of the collection, which for the most part retains its esoteric organization. By taking advantage of the liberalization of rules regarding photography in the archives and advances in technology, I was able to make digital copies of the relevant reports. While this took a considerable effort, it allowed me to overcome one of the main obstacles to working with that collection: time with the documents. Very helpful in this regard was the use of an app called Tiny Scan. It converted the photos that I took of the documents into pdfs and uploaded them to the cloud. This allowed me to be much more efficient in the archives and saved me the trouble of organizing and storing a large number of individual photographs. I spent several weeks in Dublin photographing the reports for the remaining counties of Ulster. I then went north to Belfast to consult complementary sources among the various estate papers held at PRONI and a number of important theses at Queen’s University.

While the outrage papers have featured in a variety of important scholarly works, especially those by local historians, the sheer volume of reported incidents and various inconsistencies within the reports themselves have largely kept them from being examined in any systematic way. While keeping in the mind their shortcomings, my project is based upon an analysis of the reported outrages in Ulster between the years 1835 and 1841. In the time since my return I have catalogued the reports at the townland and civil parish levels. This allows me to examine patterns of unrest that emerged during this important time of social and economic change in the region during the immediate prefamine period.

I am grateful for the support that I have received through ACIS. The Larkin fellowship helped me to finish the archival research needed to complete my dissertation project. I look forward to presenting the results of my research at future regional and national meetings.