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Impact

Dr Frank Ferguson’s wide-ranging research impact on Ulster-Scots literature involves using research findings to provide guidance to museums, broadcasters, local government and the schools system in Northern Ireland (NI).

Impact is evident in:

  • Production of new cultural artefacts in Ulster-Scots literary history through partnership with museums.
  • Extensive partnership with broadcasters in co-production of a range of television and radio programmes.
  • Increasing participation in Ulster-Scots literature through working with NI’s Ministerial Advisory Group for an Ulster-Scots Academy (MAGUS) to create a report on archives, preserve UlsterScots texts and engage with marginalised communities.
  • Collaboration with educators to generate and embed innovative learning materials for UlsterScots literature, history, language, heritage and culture.
  • Enhanced cultural understanding of issues and phenomena leading to academic success in schools
  • Research Context 

    Dr Frank Ferguson’s research at Ulster University represents the most sustained externally sponsored academic research on Ulster-Scots literature in the world in the last 15 years. Ferguson’s Ulster-Scots Writing: An Anthology (2008) was part of a new wave of revisionist thinking that challenged ill-informed and sectarian stereotypes of the literary tradition.

    This work alongside Revising Robert Burns and Ulster: Literature, Religion and Politics, c.1770-1920, ‘Ulster-Scots Literature' and ‘The Industrialisation of the Irish Book’ (2009 – 2011), created a bedrock that showed Ulster-Scots literature to be a broad, creative, and lively strand of the cultural fabric of the province of Ulster, and of profound significance to the province’s wider culture and best-known writers.

    This investigation was carried out amid the backdrop of conflict resolution measures brought into NI in the wake of the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement in which major steps were taken to reassess the cultural history of all traditions within NI. Ferguson’s research helped inform this process and provided significant insights into writers’ use of and influence by Ulster-Scots language and literature

  • Sources To Corroborate 
    • Testimonial from Museum’s Officer Causeway and Glens Museum Service.
    • Testimonial from CEO, Ulster-Scots Agency.
    • Testimonial from Museum & Heritage Manager, Mid and East Antrim Museum & Heritage Service.
    • Testimonial from Television Producer.
    • Testimonial from Director, DoubleBand Films.
    • Testimonial from Series Producer, Below the Radar.
    • Testimonial from Managing Director, Westway Films.
    • Treasures of the Archives – Ulster-Scots Resources available in Northern Ireland: (MAGUS) 2018; Chair’s Testimonial (MAGUS).
    • Testimonial from Head of English, Coleraine College.
    • Testimonial in St Louisa Grammar School Magazine.

Contributors