Tom Daly

 

 

In your experience, what have been the benefits of holding an NUI award?

The main value, beyond the monetary award itself, is a real sense that you are valued as a researcher, and that you belong to a wide 'NUI family' that includes past recipients and your contemporaries, at all levels of seniority.

 

What advice would you give to prospective NUI Travelling Studentship applicants?

I would advise any prospective applicant to look long and hard at why your research needs to be conducted outside Ireland, to look at the type of researcher that has won the award in the past, and more broadly, to appreciate that (at an informal level) holding a Travelling Studentship also entails a responsibility to act as a sort of 'ambassador' for the NUI as an organisation - at least that is how I approached it!

 

 

What would you consider to be your major achievements to date?

My main achievements since receiving the award have been completing my PhD in under 3 years, having my thesis published as a book with Cambridge University Press in 2017 (The Alchemists: Questioning Our Faith in Courts as Democracy-Builders), and working as a consultant for a range of international organisations including the Council of Europe, EU, African Union, and International IDEA. I am currently a Fellow at Melbourne Law School, working on my second book (on 'democratic decay' worldwide) and helping to develop a Constitution Transformation Network to assist constitution-making across the Asia-Pacific and beyond. I am also Associate Director of the Edinburgh Centre for Constitutional Law, where I also work on constitution-building worldwide and issues like Brexit. As a consultant I am currently engaged by the African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights to design an African Judicial Network, which will link the Court with regional community courts and highest domestic courts across the 55 states of the African Union.

Any applicants interested in my work can follow me on Twitter @DemocracyTalk and can find my research on Academia.edu. You can also find a piece I wrote about my work for the Irish Times Abroad series here (published November 2017).

In 2018, three NUI Travelling Studentships will be offered in the Humanities and Social Sciences
(including Business and Law).

The closing date for applications has been extended to Friday 6 April 2018.