I was born in Lublin, Poland, where I studied at KUL University. Later I obtained my MA and PhD from University College Cork. My doctoral dissertation focused on a ninth-century Irish-influenced manuscript found in Cracow, Poland. I specialise in the cultural and religious history of the Middle Ages. I have worked on Irish illuminated manuscripts and manuscripts in Polish libraries, with my current research focusing on the cultural history of Irish mendicant orders.

I am presently completing a monograph titled Image and identity: Franciscan ideologies in medieval Ireland which focuses on the formation and expression of Franciscan identities in medieval Irish texts, iconography and spatial divisions of their houses. Recently, I have co-edited two volumes Mendicants on the margins. Geographical, social and historiographical margins in the study of medieval and early modern mendicant orders, Cork University Press, 2024 (with Dr Anne-Julie Lafaye, with Introduction I authored) and Monastic Europe: medieval communities, landscapes and settlement, Brepols 2019 (with Dr Edel Bhreathnach and Dr Keith Smith).

My professional experience includes work on two exhibitions at the National Museum of Ireland: 'Franciscan Faith: Sacred Art in Ireland, 1600-1750' and the permanent 'Medieval Ireland' exhibition. I am also interested in communicating the past into non-academic audiences through community engagement and a medium of theatre. A play titled 'Friars Walk' and based on a fourteenth-century pilgrimage account, that I work on, was performed as part of Cork Midsummer Festival, 2015.

A radio programme inspired by the performance was broadcast by UCC Campus Radio and RTÉ Lyric FM; http://tinyurl.com/friarswalkseries; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eJi_vnl0Xk. I also contributed to the Lyric FM programme 'Jerusalem Passion' that explored the theme of the Passion of Christ, elucidating universal themes of suffering and devotion; https://soundcloud.com/the-lyric-feature/sets/jerusalem-passion. The programme was on the list of finalists for the 2018 New York Festivals: World's Best Radio Programs; http://www.newyorkfestivals.com/radio/main.php?p=rp2018.

In recognition of my teaching, I was awarded the UCC President's Award for Excellence in Teaching, 2016/17. 

Research Interests

• History of medieval religious orders
• Cultural and religious history of the Franciscan Order
• Art and piety in the Middle Ages
• Form-of-life and identity
• Death and commemoration
• Gender and models of sanctity
• Sacred, liminal and transition spaces
• Irish liturgical silver in late medieval and early modern periods
• Illuminated manuscripts
• Iconography of the Man of Sorrows Related Interests
• Application of History outside of the academia
• Relevance of History to other disciplines
• Student employability

I am currently working towards producing a monograph on Franciscan cultural history in late medieval Ireland with a particular focus on piety, patronage and identity. Currently prepared papers deal with Franciscan image and identity, and with burials and devotions.

Recent peer-reviewed papers include 
•‘Material culture of mendicant orders in medieval Ireland’, in M.M. de Cevins, ed., Marginalité, économie et christianisme. Les frères mendiants dans l’économie du sacré en Europe centrale (Rennes: Rennes University, 2018, 119-144, with Anne-Julie Lafaye): by utilising anthropological studies, the paper sets the seemingly opposing issues of poverty and materiality in a wider theoretical framework.
• 'Spaces of movement and meditation: Franciscan choirs in Ireland', in H. Morvan, ed., Which sources for the history of choir location in mendicant churches (13th-16th centuries)? (Rome: Ecole française de Rome, 2020, with Anne-Julie Lafaye, forthcoming): the paper discusses the position of a choir in Irish Franciscan churches, focusing on how the choir was related to the general division and organisation of ecclesiastical space, and how the choir expressed Franciscan ideals, both materially and symbolically.
• 'The cross of death and life: Franciscan ideologies in late medieval Ireland' , in P. Turner and J. Hawkes, The rood in medieval Britain and Ireland, c. 900-c.1500, Boydell and Brewer, 2020, forthcoming.
• ‘Prayer, penance and the Passion of Christ: The iconographic programme of the Franciscan friary at Ennis, Ireland’, Studies in Iconography, 37, 2016, 75-108; the paper sheds a new light on the popular late medieval image of the Man of Sorrows and places in within Franciscan textual tradition. It discusses the set of late fifteenth-century sculptural images as reflection of Franciscan ideologies and the turbulent events in the life of the O'Brien family.
• ‘Relics and riches: familiarising the unknown in a fourteenth-century pilgrimage account from Ireland’, in M. Boulton et al., ed., The art, literature and material culture of the medieval world. Transition, transformation and taxonomy, Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2015, 111-124: explores the role of real and imaginary Jerusalem as well as the process of naming new experiences.
• 'Inflamed with seraphic ardor: Franciscan learning and spirituality in the fourteenth-century Irish pilgrimage account’, Franciscan Studies, 70, 2012, 283-312; the paper deals with an understudied and the only pilgrimage account to survive from late medieval Ireland by analysing the role of international religious orders in the transmission of cultural ideas between Ireland, continental Europe and Islamic territories.
 
A more long-term project is based on my interest in Polish illuminated manuscripts, 800-1300. The research looks at manuscripts as witnesses to changes in the nature of cultural, ecclesiastical and political relationships between medieval Poland and the rest of Europe. 

I am a co-editor of Monastic Europe: medieval communities, landscapes and settlement (Brepols: Turnhout, 2019) co-edited with Drs Edel Bhreathnach and Keith Smith. 

My teaching is based on the application of the core skills of a historian including assessment of primary evidence and the critical analysis of sources in the traditional desk-based research as well as in the area of public history and digital technologies. From the first through to the third-year courses, I focus on the study of primary sources, while introducing the students to digital resources and various repositories (museum, library, archives) relevant to their study interest and encouraging them to take on the multifaceted and multi-disciplinary approach in their own studies. That is done with a view of training the students as historians while making them aware of different professional paths they make take after completing their studies.My teaching interests include medieval cultural and religious history, history of the medieval religious orders, form-of-life and identity, sacred and liminal spaces, Franciscan intellectual and cultural heritage, art and devotion, death and commemoration, gender and models of sanctity, application of History outside of the academia and students employability.

Modules taught

• HI1005 Pilgrims and Crusaders
• HI2104 Special Research Project
• HI2105 Case Studies in Research Skills
• HI3200 Seminar: Society, Art and Religion in Late Medieval Ireland
• HI3122 Ritual and Space in the Late Middle Ages
• Hi6075 MA in History, Making History Public
• HI6088 MA in Medieval History, Historical Contexts for Medievalists
• HI6089 MA in Medieval History, Insular Encounters with the Wider World
• HI6091 MA in Medieval History, Skills for Medieval Historians

Students’ achievements:

2012: Jesse Harrington was an overall winner in the Historical Studies & Archaeology category of the Undergraduate Awards for his essay on ‘Conveying the Sacred: Expressions of sacred space and sacred time in the scheme of Ardmore cathedral’, completed for the third-year Hi3122 module; http://www.undergraduateawards.com/alumni/jess-harrington/.

2016: Richard Harrington has been identified as an outstanding academic at the international level by the Undergraduate Awards panel for his paper entitled ‘Books for the illiterate? The use of secular and religious images in the late Middle Ages’, submitted for the Hi3122 module. The work made to the top 10% of all submissions in the History category, after being assessed by a panel of academics from universities around the world.

2017: Natasha Dukelow and Martha Ewence received a joint inaugural Jennifer O'Reilly Memorial Prize awarded by the School of History for the best BA degree project in Medieval History. Their award winning dissertations supervised by Dr D’Aughton were completed for the third-year Hi3200 seminar on Monastic Ireland co-taught with Dr Damian Bracken. Martha Ewence’s work on ‘The Friars Minor in Ireland and the expression of the vow of poverty’ explores how mendicant orders in Ireland expressed their vow of poverty, while obtaining donations.  It examines how the tension between poverty and property in the Franciscan Order brought about divisions and criticisms of their way of life. Natasha Dukelow in her study on ‘The portrayal of women in Franciscan literature’ examines representations of women in Franciscan literature from the images of the Virgin Mary to Mary Magdalene, a repentant prostitute. She considers such portrayal as reflection of the society’s prevailing attitudes and prime concerns relating to women.

2019: Ana Harrington received the Jennifer O'Reilly Memorial Prize in Medieval History for her seminar dissertation titled ‘Preaching the Fourth Lateran Council. Communion and confession in the Franciscan Liber Exemplorum’  and Maeve Towey received the J.J. Lee History Prize. Meave's seminar dissertation focused on ‘Franciscan identity in the poetry of Philip Bocht Ó hUiginn’.

2019: Natasha Dukelow received Excellence Scholarship to conduct her doctoral research on late medieval preaching and society in Ireland.

2010: Andrew Neville (jointly supervised with Dr Diarmuid Scully) received the Jennifer O'Reilly Memorial Prize in Medieval History for his individual research project that asked a question 'Does the portrayal of Reginald fitzUrse show a demonic influence in the murder of Thomas Becket ?'

Innovation in teaching
In recognition of my teaching I was awarded the UCC President's Award for Excellence in Teaching, 2016-17. All my courses, apart from the first-years involve visits to Special Collections, where students learn about this unique repository and get to work on primary evidence. Hi3122 and Hi3200 modules involve field trips, when students are taken on a walking tour of medieval Cork as well as a visit to a working Franciscan friary where they can see the ideals of monasticism they study in practice.

Hi6091: Skills for Medieval Historians, MA in Medieval History, a new module developed by Dr Małgorzata Krasnodębska-D’Aughton, School of History, UCC and Ms Elaine Harrington, Special Collections Librarian, UCC, introduced in 2016-17. The principal aim of the Hi6091 module is to combine the skills of a historian with transferable skills in order to enhance students' employability and increase their awareness of potential careers within and outside of the academia. That aim is achieved through the design and creation of the online exhibition presented as a series of blog posts written by the students, see http://blogs.ucc.ie/wordpress/theriverside/. During the course the students apply their research and skills of historical analysis and interpretation to the writing of history for a wider public. Through seminars and practical exercises, the students are guided by Elaine Harrington to engage with practical issues of copyright restrictions, digital presence, object handling and photography. They also discuss possibilities of marketing and publicity for their online project with Peter Finnegan of Blackstone Launchpad. As the exhibition is a group effort, the students learn about the importance of soft skills of communication, negotiation, collaboration, team work and meeting deadlines. Feedback from the students has been very positive, both in relation to appreciation of the public outcome of their research, the practical aspect of the work as well as in relation to developing professional and personal skills. The exhibition titled ‘The Book of Kells: Images and Text’ was lunched online on 26 May 2017 on the UCC Library’s River-side portal.

In 2019 MA in Medieval History students completed an online exhibition titled ‘The Luttrell Psalter: knighthood, hospitality and piety’, http://blogs.ucc.ie/wordpress/theriverside/2019/01/14/the-luttrell-psalter-knighthood-hospitality-and-piety-introduction/ ; within the first week of its launch the exhibition received over 1200 impressions and 182 visits registered on Twitter, over 70 likes on History Facebook page. Hi6091: Skills for Medieval Historians, MA in Medieval History. Part of the course is given to work placements specifically designed for the students interested in Medieval History: UCC Special Collections, CELT Corpus of Electronic Texts and Cork Public Museum. All work placements have a public dimension where students’ work is made available to wider audiences either electronically or via exhibition.

Collaboration
 2017: ‘Women, Place and Space’, organiser of the CACSSS masterclass that explored the presence of women in physical and ideological spaces across a chronological and geographical span. With contributions from scholars working in the areas of Gender and Women’s Studies (Catherine Lawless, Trinity College Dublin), History (Finola Doyle-O’Neill), Art History (Panayota Volti, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense; Mary Healy), Study of Religions (Lidia Guzy), Theatre Studies (Marie Kelly), Classics (Catherine Ware) and Applied Social Studies (Caitríona Ní Laoire).
2017: Co-organiser of the masterclass in the Discovery Programme. As part of the Hi6091 skills-based module, MA in Medieval History, UCC History postgraduates are introduced to cross-disciplinary research and working with postgraduates from other institutions.

2016: Organiser and contributor to the postgraduate masterclass ‘Encountering the Other: Travel, Transition and Transformation’. The class formed part of PG7004 Master Class Module 2015-2016, Contemporary Theoretical Paradigms in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Graduate School, College of Arts, Celtic Studies Social Science, https://www.ucc.ie/en/cacsss/grads/news/fullstory-621318-en.html.

2015: I organised Applied History Symposium, held in UCC, Conference Room, North Wing. A symposium involved the speakers with experience in the areas of heritage, education, career guidance, outreach, business and diplomacy. The symposium provided new and refreshing ways of looking at how we teach history and how essential history is to the creative economy with an important message that Ireland has the potential to lead the world in technology-enhanced experiences of history and heritage.

Recent Postgraduates

Year: 2010
Name: Shane McAuliffe
Intitution: University College Cork
Degree: MA IN MEDIEVAL STUDIES
Thesis: The three Magi as the figures of wisdom: Studies in patristic and Hiberno-Latin exegesis

Year: 2015
Name: Emma McCarthy
Intitution: University College Cork
Degree: MA IN MEDIEVAL STUDIES
Thesis: The representations of Saint Margaret of Antioch in medieval Ireland

Year: 2015
Name: Alan O'Rourke
Intitution: University College Cork
Degree:
Thesis: Medieval churches of the Lee valley

Year: 2013
Name: Katriona Burke
Intitution: University College Cork
Degree: MA IN MEDIEVAL STUDIES
Thesis: The cult of St Catherine of Alexandria in medieval Ireland

Year: 2013
Name: Jason Cadogan
Intitution: University College Cork
Degree: MA IN MEDIEVAL STUDIES
Thesis: Religious discourse in Franciscan texts, c. 1219-1350

Year: 2010
Name: Celine O’Sullivan
Intitution: University College Cork
Degree:
Thesis: Aspects of Franciscan Cork: From arrival to revival

Year: 2011
Name: Jacinta Clair
Intitution: University College Cork
Degree: MA IN MEDIEVAL STUDIES
Thesis: Irish book shrines: Politics and piety in medieval Ireland

Year: 2012
Name: Terri Kearney
Intitution: University College Cork
Degree:
Thesis: The Lough Hyne area through history

Year: 2015
Name: Branden Bettger
Intitution: University College Cork
Degree:
Thesis: Death and Marian devotion in late medieval Ireland

Year: 2017
Name: Natasha Dukelow
Intitution: University College Cork
Degree: MA IN MEDIEVAL STUDIES
Thesis: Mary: Mother, Virgin, Intercessor and Model. The Case of the Liber Exemplorum 

Project: Material Culture of the Irish Mendicant Orders ( )
Funding Body: Irish Research Council
Start/End Dates: 01-MAR-06 / 01-MAR-08 Award: €220,000.00

Project: Post-Doctoral IRCHSS Fellowship ( )
Funding Body: Irish Research Council
Start/End Dates: 01-JAN-02 / 01-JAN-04 Award: £52.000

Project: Monastic Ireland: Landscape and Settlement ( )
Funding Body: Irish Research Council
Start/End Dates: 01-MAR-14 / 31-AUG-16 Award: €369,000.00

Project: Intersections: Culture and Creativity ( )
Funding Body: UCC Strategic Research Fund
Start/End Dates: 01-OCT-14 / 30-SEP-15 Award: €9,680.00

Project: Government of Ireland Postgraduate Fellowship 2017; Anne-Julie Lafaye; "Spiritual Infrastructure, Space and Society: the Augustinian Friars in Late Medieval Ireland"; GOIPD/2017/1323; Malgorzata Krasnodebska-D'Aughton ( R17664)
Funding Body: Irish Research Council
Start/End Dates: 01-OCT-17 / 30-JUN-20 Award: €128,803.00