Cambridge Fellowship allows Jackie to pursue Emily Anderson biography
Historian Dr Jackie Uí Chionna, who is based at the Moore Institute for Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences at NUIG, has been awarded a prestigious research fellowship at Cambridge University.
The Archives By-Fellowship at Churchill College Cambridge will enable Dr Uí Chionna to work on a biography of Emily Anderson OBE (1891-1962), which she’s currently researching. Anderson was the daughter of Alexander Anderson, who served as president of UCG from 1899 to 1934. She became Professor of German at UCG in 1917, aged just 26.
Anderson formally resigned her Chair in 1919 to join the British Foreign Office. In reality, she had already been working for several years on intelligence work for the fledgling British Secret Service and ultimately became the foremost female code-breaker of her generation. She retired in 1952.
Alongside her intelligence work, Anderson was passionate about music. She became a world-renowned musicologist, and author of both The Letters of Mozart and his Family and The Letters of Beethoven, books which remain standard references for music students and scholars alike. Anderson was awarded an OBE by the British for her intelligence work during the Second World War and, remarkably, she was also awarded the Order of Merit, First Class, the highest award of the Federal Republic of Germany. That was for her work on Beethoven. The Germans were unaware of her secret intelligence work through two World Wars, according to Dr Uí Chionna.
Cambridge is the world centre for research in the history of Intelligence, and the Churchill College Archives Centre, where Dr Uí Chionna will be based for an academic term next year, houses the finest collection of diplomatic and intelligence-related archives in the UK.
For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.