Nora Baker is awarded a Maddock Research Fellowship

Nora Baker has been awarded a Maddock Research Fellowship from Marsh’s Library, Dublin, to allow her to spend two weeks in its archives. Marsh’s Library, founded in 1707, is the oldest public library in Ireland, and each year it awards grants to advanced PhD students and scholars of all career stages to conduct research among its extensive collections.

Nora will be looking at several rare books in the library’s holdings which relate to religious controversy in the seventeenth century. She is particularly interested in narratives discussing conversion, Nicodemism, and guilt. The works she will consult at Marsh’s Library will inform her PhD research, which looks at the escape accounts of Huguenot refugees after 1685, when Protestantism was formally banned by Louis XIV of France. Rather than convert to Catholicism, the authors whose writing forms the corpus of Nora’s thesis left their home country to practise their religion abroad. Nora works on the emotional impact of these journeys into exile, and asks how her authors perceived and interpreted the challenges they faced. She will write a report on the findings of her research fellowship at Marsh’s Library following her stay there in December of this year.