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Integrating Heritage

Doctoral Scholarship at Trinity Business School, Dublin (Ireland)

Stephanie Decker FAcSS FBAM

Oct 15

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Integrating Heritage at Trinity East

Trinity Research Doctorate Award 2025-2029

Commercial Heritage

We invite applications to doctoral research on the commercial heritage of Trinity East site in Grand Canal Dock, Dublin, as part of the interdisciplinary research project Integrating Heritage at Trinity East.

The heritage of Trinity East is uniquely complex, a combination of tangible and intangible and of multiple historical and present actors, and requires an interdisciplinary study. Our research project will study the built, cultural, commercial, and natural heritage of the Trinity East site and the larger Grand Canal Dock area. Our aim is to understand how the historical complexity and legacy of human-environment interactions have shaped the unique challenges and possibilities of this site and how the globalisation of Dublin has affected local communities and their natural and built environments.

This study seeks to help ‘re-earth’ the Trinity East site as it develops and thereby demonstrate what else a city can be in the midst of an overdeveloped industrial and residential zone in which civic space, community flourishing, and biodiversity have been, at best, supplementary concerns.

The successful applicant will be fully funded (see below) and will join a team of three other PhD researchers and four co-PIs across Business, History of Art and Architecture, History, and Geography. The project will integrate these studies to understand how the historical complexity and legacy of human-environment interactions shape the challenges and possibilities unique to this site. It will explore the historical and contemporary pathways and practices through which commercial actors, local and global communities, and other human and non-human agents have influenced the Trinity East site and its locale.

Details of the Award

This PhD project will be supervised by Professor Catherine Welch in Trinity Business School. It will examine the most recent, much-publicised transformation of the site, into the so- called ‘Silicon Docks’.

The attraction of technology-based multinational investors to the site has been used as a symbol of Ireland’s economic success. But what has the impact of this investment actually been on local business and professional communities?

The PhD student will examine

a) the nature of the investment made by multinationals (both physical, in the form of the built environment, and intangible, in the form of capital, human and knowledge flows),
b) the types of global interconnections that this investment has produced; and
c) the impact on diverse economic actors in local communities, including local suppliers, start-up firms, and professional workers.

The timespan of multinational activity on the site (20+ years) will necessitate the use of oral history, archival research, and the analysis of artefacts.

Outputs of the project will be academic papers, an oral history collection of local startup firms, and policy recommendations on foreign investment in Ireland.

The Award includes a €25k per annum tax-free stipend for 4 years and a tuition fee write-down. This excludes the once-off Application fee (€55) for Admission and the annual Student Levies & Charges (SLC) (approx. €200 p.a.) charged to students at registration.

Candidates should have an undergraduate degree in Business or History, and a strong academic background in these areas. A Masters degree in a cognate subject area would be an advantage.

The successful applicant must be registered and ready to commence by March 2026.

Details of Application

Please send a CV, Cover Letter, and two-page Research Proposal to Professor Welch (welchc@tcd.ie) by 5pm on Friday 14 November 2025.

Viable applicants will be shortlisted for interview soon thereafter. The successful applicant will then have to apply directly to Trinity Business School.