Having been awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship, Dr Toby Barnard is working on a project to establish the chronology, pace and extent of the explosion of print in Ireland between 1680 and 1800. By looking at carefully selected samples of the genres produced and available in Ireland – plays, novels, ephemeral tracts, newspapers, sermons – the multiple and varied readerships will be brought out. Through unpublished manuscripts and abundant printed commentary, the project will show evolving and diverging attitudes: between Catholic and Protestant, men and women, traditionalists and innovators, revolutionaries and conservatives, the literate and illiterate, and those who regarded themselves as ‘Irish’ or the ‘English’ and ‘British’ within Ireland.