Deputy Director
The Deputy Director of Marsh’s Library is Sue Hemmens. Originally qualified as a biochemist, she holds a master’s degree in library and information science and a PhD in the area of early modern natural philosophy. Research interests include the history of natural philosophy in the early modern period, with a particular focus on Ireland; the dissemination of music in print and manuscript in eighteenth-century Ireland; and the customisation of library discovery interfaces. She served as a member of Working Group 6 (Visualisation and Communication) in the COST Action IS1310, ‘Reassembling the Republic of Letters’. In 2018, she was awarded a David Walker Memorial short-term visiting research fellowship in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.
Recent publications and communications:
‘“The Dimensions of Furnaces”: The Chymical Explorations of the Molyneux Brothers’. William Molyneux of Dublin (1656-1698): Life, Work, Legacy, St Audoen’s Church, Dublin, 23 November, 2019.
‘Visualising the memory of a journey: Bouhéreau’s diary as a digital map.’ Élie Bouhéreau & the World of the Huguenots, 15, 16, 17 November 2019.
‘”Some things worth a philosophical pen”: queries and desiderata relating to Ireland, 1650 to 1700’. Irish Renaissance Seminar, Marsh’s Library, Dublin, 12 October 2019.
‘”Plants after their kind”: botanical works in Marsh’s Library.’ Early Modern Botany, Worth Library, Dublin, 17 November 2017.
‘Collaboration and controversy: witnessing the cosmos in early modern Dublin’, HSTM Network Ireland Conference, Royal Dublin Society, Dublin 13–14 October 2017.
(with Jason McElligott) ‘Artifice and Creativity in the Books and Manuscripts of Elias Bouhéreau.’ Literary Archives in the Digital Age, Trinity College Dublin, 7–8 July 2017.
‘”Knotty problems in algebra”: mathematical collections in Marsh’s Library. IHoM4, Worth Library, Dublin, 9 June 2017.
‘”Bright blazes … cast of[f] from the sun”: the Provost, the Comet, the World & its Maker’, paper at the 14th ECLRNI Research Symposium, Marsh’s Library, 26 November 2016
‘”Those ingenious communications”: correspondence networks of the Dublin Philosophical Society’, paper at the HSTM Network Ireland Conference, Maynooth University, 13-14 November 2015
‘”Books are [in]finite’: Breaking the Bounds of the Information Space’, paper at the Digital Material Conference, Moore Institute, NUI Galway, 21-22 May 2015
‘Crow’s Nest and beyond: Chymistry in the Dublin Philosophical Society, 1683–1709’, Intellectual History Review (Boyle Special Issue, Spring 2015). Guest editors Michael Hunter and Elizabethanne Boran. Available at http://www.tandfonline.com/
‘“A goodly heritage”: the eighteenth-century music archive of Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin’, Irish Archives 21 (2014).
‘”The honour of correspondence with some abroad”: epistolary networks of the Dublin Philosophical Society’, paper at the 6th International Conference of the European Society for the History of Science, Lisbon, September 2014.
‘Narcissus Marsh and the caterpillar: witnessing nature in the Dublin Philosophical Society (1683–1709)’, paper at a conference of the History of Science Committee of the Royal Irish Academy, ‘Encounters with Nature: new perspectives from Irish history’, Worth Library, Dublin, 27 September 2013.
