Bridget Moynihan completed concurrent BA Hons in Sociology and English Literature in 2013 and an MA in English Literature in 2015 at the University of Calgary. She is currently completing her PhD in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh where she is a committed interdisciplinary scholar.
Bridget’s thesis, titled ‘Digital Découpage: Reading and Prototyping the Material Poetics and Queer Ephemera of the Edwin Morgan Scrapbooks, 1931-1966’, combines a close reading of the poetics and politics of sixteen scrapbooks compiled by Scottish poet Edwin Morgan (1920-2010) with a research through design approach to building digital interfaces for the scrapbooks. As the scrapbooks contain mostly twentieth-century material for which Morgan did not own copyright, this digitisation effort requires thinking beyond facsimile approaches to develop rich metadata and experimental visualisations that give the print-based scrapbooks an online presence without breaching copyright. For this, she has developed her database programming skills and is collaborating with computer scientists to build the prototypes. One of the prototypes in Bridget’s research has been built in collaboration with Dr. Anouk Lang and PhD candidate Jonathan Armoza through a Carnegie Trust funded project titled ‘Working from Scraps’.
Broadly, Bridget’s interests are in nineteenth- and twentieth-century print culture, experimental poetics, archive management and digitalisation, and the development and use of digital humanities tools. Her research is strikingly original, working to bring marginalised print objects, like scrapbooks, to the fore within rapidly expanding digital humanities conversations.
Since joining the University of Edinburgh in 2015, Bridget co-founded ‘Inciting Sparks’, a postgraduate website that publishes monthly articles by arts and humanities students. She worked as research assistant for the Edinburgh University Press, interned with the Centre for Research Collections and with the Data Library, and is an active volunteer with the Digital Imaging Unit of the University of Edinburgh Library. She also undertook a three-month internship at the British Library, where she researched and helped to publicise the laboratory notebooks of Dr. Anne McLaren, a developmental biologist whose experimental work was foundational to the development of in vitro fertilisation.
Bridget is also currently employed as a Library Advisor for the City of Edinburgh Public Libraries and Armchair Books, a second-hand, rare, and antiquarian bookseller in Edinburgh. At the University of Calgary, she was recipient of the prestigious SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship and she has received an Edinburgh Literatures, Languages and Cultures College Scholarship and a Global Research Scholarship during her PhD studies.
