Claire Heffernan
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 973654 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Claire Heffernan |
| NOMBRES | Claire |
| APELLIDO | Heffernan |
| FIRMA | HEFFERNAN C |
| AFILIACIONES | University College Dublin |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5001-4257 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 76 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 30 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 76 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1997 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 4 |
Hyderabad’s egg value chain
In 2024, stunting affected over 150 million children under five worldwide, with India being one of the countries with the highest prevalence. The links between stunting, animal health and the health of the environment make a multi-sectoral and interdisciplinary approach essential to combatting childhood stunting in affected countries. This study examined the egg value chain in Hyderabad, India, investigating its potential influences on childhood …
Working‐Class Muscles? Co‐Operative Gyms in Interwar Britain
The Health & Strength League's network of co‐operative gymnasiums constituted one of interwar Britain's most significant yet overlooked physical culture institutions, affiliating over 800 gyms across Britain and Ireland by 1939. Drawing on Health & Strength magazine's editorial content and reader contributions, this article argues that these institutions represented a distinct form of working‐class physical culture that fused muscular Christianit…
Riding the Waves of Change
While surfing in Ireland is a sport on the ascendancy, both in terms of recreational and competitive participants, a great deal more work needs to be done on the sport’s origin within the country. This is especially the case for women’s surfing on the island. Irish women entered surfing from the 1960s onwards, with the role of geography, family networks, and equipment access shaping participation patterns. Women’s entry mechanisms into surfing wa…
Tests of Manhood
The general public, both within Ireland and further abroad, has begun to take an interest in Irish lifting stones. A simple premise, lifting stones are historically significant stones which were typically lifted as tests of manhood within rural and fishing communities in Ireland. It is an Irish practice with global parallels in Europe and Asia. The popular history of this endeavour is currently being written with claims that this practice, once p…
Gymnastics and childhood in early-nineteenth-century Dublin
Beginning in the late 1820s, gymnastics for adults and children became a noted phenomenon within some Irish cities. Predominantly led by foreign gymnastic instructors, the gymnastics wave marked a specific movement of transnationalism within Irish health and education. This article considers Dublin-based gymnastic instructors and physicians, weaving together histories of medicine, gender and transnationalism. Irish children’s bodies became a site…
Defining Success in American Fitness
This article examines how American physical culture entrepreneurs between 1880 and 1918 transformed ideas of health and success by merging commercial ambition with claims to scientific authority. Figures such as Eugen Sandow, Bernarr Macfadden, and Alan Calvert redefined bodily achievement through measurement, photography, and visible transformation, translating market-based ideals of progress and self-mastery into corporeal form. These framework…
Mistakes I Carried
My critical mistake as a historian was ignoring the physical body as a site of knowledge production. For years, I analyzed fitness history in archives and images while overlooking the value of embodied experience. Recognizing this blind spot offers historians a powerful new lens-namely, that bodies can serve as historical archives that capture dimensions of the past inaccessible through traditional sources. In this article, I explore this approac…
Challenges to research implementation during public health emergencies
Health emergencies, including pandemics, are not new occurrences; some notable ones occurred in the past. However, the scale of the COVID-19 pandemic is unprecedented. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the unpreparedness of national health systems in effectively managing health emergencies. During the pandemic, controlling the spread of the virus and hopes of exiting into a post-pandemic era were reliant on research to improve patient care and inform…
Physical culture, posing, and the medium of fitness magazines
Physical culture describes a new socio-political interest in physical activity which emerged in the late nineteenth century and became a global phenomenon. Physical culture was concerned with the ‘commercial and ideological cultivation of the body’, as made manifest in gymnasium and keep fit cultures. This paper focuses specifically on physical culture magazines, which began to be sold with regularity in North America and Europe from the late 189…
An elegant and able practitioner’. Marian Mason and the rise of women’s calisthenics in nineteenth century Britain
In 1826 Marian Mason was introduced to British society as a callisthenic instructor. Trained by P.H. Clias, a gymnast who oversaw physical training in the military and navy, Mason is the first high profile female fitness coach in British history. Despite her importance as a landmark figure, Mason's contributions, and indeed life, remain relatively obscured from the historical record. Studying Mason's heyday in public life from 1826 to the early 1…
It’s in the game’
Videogames are a still understudied component of sports history despite their growing importance in sporting and leisure fields.Videogames help engage and include sporting fans, are more interactive than spectating and, in some ways, help solidify sporting narratives.As videogames grew in popularity and marketability in the 2000s, developers sought ways to connect their games with their respective sports' histories.This is most notably seen in th…
Strength, gender, and volunteering
this study provides the first meaningful examination of para-powerlifting in ireland. a sport practiced around the world, para-powerlifting has not yet received a great deal of academic attention despite research done in related fields such as wheelchair bodybuilding (sparkes, Brighton, and inckle 2018). irish para-powerlifting is distinguished by the fact that the competitors are women operating in a hyper-masculine space. semi-structured interv…
I Quit”
This article examines concussion in 1990s wrestling, specifically during the World Wrestling Federation's (WWF) “Attitude Era,” an epoch marked by intense physicality and boundary-pushing narratives. Conventional discourse about concussion in sports typically centers on the inherent risks and regulations associated with athletic competition. However, to truly comprehend the nature and frequency of concussions in the Attitude Era, it is imperative…
Representations of Hulk Hogan in the 1980s
In 1984, professional wrestler Hulk Hogan defeated the Iron Sheik to win the WWF Heavyweight Title. Thus marked the birth of ‘Hulkamania’, a near-decade-long period when Hulk Hogan (real name Terry Bollea) crossed over into American popular culture. In the following years, Hogan battled a series of proxies for America’s enemies, from the Soviet rival in Nikolai Volkoff, Iranian sympathizer Sergeant Slaughter, and the Japanese sumo wrestler Yokozu…
Local contextual factors of child stunting found via shared values of stakeholder groups
Objective: This work aims to demonstrate an original approach to identify links between locally situated shared values and contextual factors of stunting. Stunting results from multi-factorial and multi-sectoral determinants, but interventions typically neglect locally situated lived experiences, which contributes to problematic designs that are not meaningful for those concerned and/or relatively ineffective. Design: This case study investigates…
A great weight lifted the history of the British Amateur Weight-lifting Association
Despite its longevity as an Olympic sport, Olympic weight-lifting has yet to receive sustained scholarly attention, an observation made all the more confusing when one considers weight-lifting’s inclusion at the 1896 Olympic Games and its rich nineteenth century history. The dearth of studies on weight-lifting outside of the United States can be found in the paucity of histories on individual national federations. This is certainly the case in Gr…
Physical education in Irish schools, 1900–2000
The Best Developed Man in Great Britain and Ireland? Eugen Sandow and the Commercialization of Eugenics in Twentieth-Century Britain
In 1901 Eugen Sandow, a strong man performer turned health authority, hosted a competition in the Royal Albert Hall to determine the ‘best developed man in Great Britain and Ireland’. At the contest, members of the public, the military, and the scientific community watched as Sandow and his judges compared men’s physiques. Typically depicted by historians as a pivotal step in the development of bodybuilding as a sport, this article repositions Sa…
Wisdom from the Wickets
Sporting diplomacy has long been a topic of considerable interest to sport historians. This is especially true in discussions of British colonialism in India. Building on such work, this article provides an in-depth examination of George Robert Canning Harris, the Fourth Baron Harris, who was Governor of the Presidency of Bombay from 1890 to 1895. Absent from the historical examination of cricket in the subcontinent is the extent to which the dom…
Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, Fit Nation
Journal Article Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America’s Exercise Obsession Get access Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America’s Exercise Obsession, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2022. Pp. 443. $28.99. ISBN 9780226651101. Conor Heffernan Conor Heffernan Ulster University [email protected] https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5001-4257 Search for other works by this auth…
Miracle Foods and Definition Diets
Bodybuilding often acts as an echo chamber for broader societal worries. Surveying previously unexplored bodybuilding diets and food supplements, this article studies the nutritional dictates of Rheo H. Blair and Vince Gironda, two of the most popular coaches of 1960s America. Their recommendations capitalized on fears of nutritional purity and a fetishization of muscular masculinities for heterosexual, white Americans. The article situates Blair…
Cartoon and satire as source
On 8 April 1920, the first sports editorial cartoon by teenager Jack Nicolle appeared in Health & Strength magazine. The series of illustrations in the world’s oldest physical culture periodical captured the absurdity of ‘circus lifts’ performed at a recent W.A. Pullum lifting exhibition. The piece ignited a torrid eleven-month run of insightful, humorous, and bitingly satirical commentary often directed towards leaders of the British strength co…
Just Look At His Vascularity
In 1991, legendary bodybuilder Lou Ferrigno announced his intention to return to competition. Rather than host a mere established bodybuilding contest, he decided to throw his weight behind the newest company, established only a year previously: Vince McMahon’s World Bodybuilding Federation (WBF). When asked why he chose the WBF he said, “What’s nice about the WBF is that you have a choice to pick your own character. Music, the posing, connecting…
The kings of strength
The African Cup of Nations
Physical culture, the Royal Irish Constabulary and police masculinities in Ireland, 1900–14
This article examines the importance of physical culture systems for Irishmen seeking to enter the Royal Irish Constabulary (R.I.C), and those already operating within it, in the period 1900 to 1914. R.I.C. entrance requirements encouraged some men to alter their bodies physically to meet standardised body measurements for police officers. Simultaneously, a growing body of literature urged men to reflect upon their stature and, if found deficient…
Women’s Jūjutsu and Judo in the Early Twentieth-Century
Studies relating to female participation in sport are increasing, and there is an emerging body of work regarding women in the martial arts. Seeking to continue the work of Emelyne Godfrey, Wendy Rouse, and others, this article explores the lives of three Englishwomen, Phoebe Roberts, Edith Garrud, and Sarah Mayer, operating in the early twentieth-century. Chosen primarily for their innovative promotion of the discipline, these women shared a lov…
The concept of poverty
Poverty is often presented as an evolving concept linked to dominant development paradigms. However, changes in the meaning of specific topics comprising definitions of poverty have been largely overlooked. Therefore, the authors adopted a synchronic approach to evaluate changes contained within 159 definitions of poverty offered over a 30-year period from 1970s to 2000s. Component terms were investigated for their stability in meaning, through t…
What is poverty? A diachronic exploration of the discourse on poverty from the 1970s to the 2000s
The language of poverty
Within the development discourse, the narratives of the poor are a well utilized rhetorical tool to describe poverty and its causes. However, narratives can also reveal the beliefs and ‘world‐view’ of the narrators. To explore this influence, the authors applied a discursive approach, to deconstruct the narratives of 101 slum dwellers in Kibera, Nairobi. The results revealed that poverty was largely attributed to external constraints, beyond an i…
Restocking
Metadata only record
The kings of strength
State of the Field
This article surveys the state of the field of physical culture within the discipline of history. Understood broadly as a society's interest in gymnasium and health cultures, physical culture has become a topic of increasing importance for historians, sociologists and performance scholars in the past two decades. Seen as a distinct field from sport history, works on physical culture have evolved from sporadic and one‐off studies to nuanced discus…
Building husky men
Examining American fitness entrepreneurs from the 1930s, this article examines efforts to reform young, and white, masculine identities through new bodybuilding systems. Centred on Mark Berry, Bob Hoffman and Charles Atlas, three of the decade’s most successful entrepreneurs, the article examines the communities, methods and discourses used to attract customers and create a highly specified form of self-fashioning. In doing so, the article highli…
The iron rusted and decayed in our clubs’
As a branch of sport history, the historiography of weightlifting lags behind other areas. The field is growing but much work needs to be done on its origins. Seeking to provide some context as to the origins of organised weightlifting in Europe, the following article uses Ireland as an ideal case study. The first two major efforts to form an Irish weightlifting organisation in the 1910s and early 1920s failed owing to a series of material and id…
Body projects as a historical phenomenon
As perhaps the most ephemeral historical object, studying the physical body in history is a challenging and complex affair. It is for this reason that many scholars have lamented the ‘invisible body’ in historical research, that is to say the lived, healthy, body which is often discussed but never truly examined. Using the example of physical culture in Ireland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, this article explores the idea of …
Truly muscular Gaels? W.N. Kerr, physical culture and Irish masculinity in the early twentieth century
In 1908 W.N. Kerr, a tee-totalling, non-smoking, vegetarian athlete from Dublin took first place in a ‘Best Developed’ figure competition. Two years previously, Kerr had written to Vitality magazine, an English physical culture periodical, declaring his interest in building his physique. Kerr, like many other men in England and Ireland, had become enamoured with physical culture, a societal interest in the body as cultivated through diet and exer…
Born swinging’
Strength Peddlers
Building on Geraldine Biddle-Perry's 2014 discussion of Gamage's department store, and seeking to address the still existent historical dearth on sporting retail, the following article highlights the case of Eddie O’Callaghan, an Irish bicycle and physical culture retailer operating in fin de siècle Ireland. Focused exclusively on O’Callaghan's trade in ‘Sandow Developers’, an elastic workout device sold by famed physical culturist Eugen Sandow, …
Tibetan Veterinary Medicine
Restocking
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The Livestock Guru
The application of ICTs to meet development objectives has increased dramatically in recent years. Nevertheless, there is a little overall evidence regarding the impact of these tools on the poor. Therefore, this article describes the creation and assessment of the Livestock Guru, an interactive multimedia program for poor livestock keepers in India and Bolivia. Learning outcomes were explored among 305 farmers in 17 communities across both natio…
What is poverty? A diachronic exploration of the discourse on poverty from the 1970s to the 2000s
Building synergies in development research
Development research has responded to a number of charges over the past few decades. For example, when traditional research was accused of being 'top-down', the response was participatory research, linking the 'receptors' to the generators of research. As participatory processes were recognised as producing limited outcomes, the demand-led agenda was born. In response to the alleged failure of research to deliver its products, the 'joined-up' mod…
The language of poverty
Within the development discourse, the narratives of the poor are a well utilized rhetorical tool to describe poverty and its causes. However, narratives can also reveal the beliefs and ‘world‐view’ of the narrators. To explore this influence, the authors applied a discursive approach, to deconstruct the narratives of 101 slum dwellers in Kibera, Nairobi. The results revealed that poverty was largely attributed to external constraints, beyond an i…
Biodiversity versus emergencies
Restocking is a favoured option in supporting livelihoods after a disaster. With the depletion of local livestock populations, the introduction of new species and breeds will clearly affect biodiversity. Nevertheless, the impact of restocking on Animal Genetic Resources has been largely ignored. The aim of this paper, therefore, is to examine the consequences of restocking on biodiversity via a simple model. Utilising a hypothetical project based…
The concept of poverty
Poverty is often presented as an evolving concept linked to dominant development paradigms. However, changes in the meaning of specific topics comprising definitions of poverty have been largely overlooked. Therefore, the authors adopted a synchronic approach to evaluate changes contained within 159 definitions of poverty offered over a 30-year period from 1970s to 2000s. Component terms were investigated for their stability in meaning, through t…
ICTs and decision making
Pro-poor decision making depends on an understanding of the complexities and inter-relationships between household livelihood, demographic, and economic factors. This article describes the design and implementation of the Poverty Assessor, a software programme to assist practitioners, policy makers, and researchers in visualising the direct impacts on poverty of specific livelihood factors and events among populations living in poverty. The softw…
The representation of highly pathogenic avian influenza in the Chinese media
In the early 2000s the threat of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza captured the attention of the world's media. While China is often considered the epicentre of the panzootic, few studies have explored coverage of this variant of avian flu in China. To address this issue, the authors examined the portrayal of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza across four Chinese newspapers at the local and national level. A textual analysis was performed on 160 a…
The impact of livestock assets among indigenous communities on the Bolivian Altiplano
Measuring poverty has occupied a lot of space in the development discourse. Over the years a number of approaches have been offered to capture the experience of what it means to be poor. However, latterly such approaches often ignore core assets. Indeed, the comparative impact of livestock vs. other core assets such as land and education on poverty has not been well explored. Therefore, the authors created an 'asset impact model' to examine chang…
Strength Peddlers
Building on Geraldine Biddle-Perry's 2014 discussion of Gamage's department store, and seeking to address the still existent historical dearth on sporting retail, the following article highlights the case of Eddie O’Callaghan, an Irish bicycle and physical culture retailer operating in fin de siècle Ireland. Focused exclusively on O’Callaghan's trade in ‘Sandow Developers’, an elastic workout device sold by famed physical culturist Eugen Sandow, …
Indian club swinging in the early Victorian period
Although relatively unknown to the modern fitness enthusiast, Indian club swinging, the practice of swinging bottle shaped clubs for gymnastic exercise, was once a highly popular form of recreation and rehabilitation in Victorian England. Inspired by the centuries-old Indian practice of jori swinging, club swinging first emerged in England in the 1820s, thanks to its adoption by the British army. Although first viewed as a military training pract…
Embodied Nation
Laos may seem an unlikely place to study the history of sport and related aspects of physical culture. It joined the Olympic movement only in 1979 and has never come close to winning a medal ... Such
What’s Wrong with a Little Swinging? Indian Clubs as a Tool of Suppression and Rebellion in Post-Rebellion India
Though the practice of swinging weighted clubs for gymnastic exercise has a centuries long history in India, the latter half of the nineteenth century witnessed the exercise practice grow in political significance. In the years following the 1857 Indian Rebellion, both Hindu nationalists and British army officials undertook the practice with differing intent. Within the martial context, a differentiated style of British club swinging was used to …
Predicting risk of avian influenza a(H5N1) in Egypt
The aim of the tool is to enable targeting those communities that are likely to be highly vulnerable to A(H5N1) outbreaks and where control and awareness-raising efforts are expected to be most effective. In this manner, policy makers and practitioners will be able to better allocate limited resources to those communities most vulnerable to the negative impact of A(H5N1)
The temple of perfection
While historical studies into the nature of physical culture have grown in volume over the past two decades, few have focused on the gymnasium itself, thereby depriving scholars of a story rich in
Why the pain, what’s the gain? The quest for extreme fitness
Opening with an anecdote about his niece’s seemingly unproblematic decision to take up weightlifting, a traditionally male-dominated sport, Kunitz’s Why the Pain, What’s the Gain? seeks to track th
The Ideal of Manliness
With the ideals of Edward Thring, the headmaster of Uppingham from 1853 to 1887, firmly in mind, Tozer’s well researched, erudite and engaged monograph seeks to examine a specified type of British
Born swinging’
Biology and the beast? The white man’s quest for physical dominance in early twentieth-century America
Drawing on the relatively nascent world of animal history, the present article seeks to demonstrate how interactions between humans and nonhumans served to both reinforce and destabilise ideas of masculinity within American society. It does so through an examination of three unusual athletic case studies, spanning the period 1893 to 1926. Beginning with Eugen Sandow’s infamous wrestling bout with Commodore the lion, the article goes on to explore…
Irish Soccer Migrants
Beginning with the first wave of Irish born footballers into British football in the late nineteenth-century, Curran’s latest study marks an ambitious effort to contextualize and scrutinize the exp
Women’s Jūjutsu and Judo in the Early Twentieth-Century
Studies relating to female participation in sport are increasing, and there is an emerging body of work regarding women in the martial arts. Seeking to continue the work of Emelyne Godfrey, Wendy Rouse, and others, this article explores the lives of three Englishwomen, Phoebe Roberts, Edith Garrud, and Sarah Mayer, operating in the early twentieth-century. Chosen primarily for their innovative promotion of the discipline, these women shared a lov…
Theorizing Zombiism, 25–27 July 2019
Truly muscular Gaels? W.N. Kerr, physical culture and Irish masculinity in the early twentieth century
In 1908 W.N. Kerr, a tee-totalling, non-smoking, vegetarian athlete from Dublin took first place in a ‘Best Developed’ figure competition. Two years previously, Kerr had written to Vitality magazine, an English physical culture periodical, declaring his interest in building his physique. Kerr, like many other men in England and Ireland, had become enamoured with physical culture, a societal interest in the body as cultivated through diet and exer…
Sociology (44 obras) · History (37 obras) · Political science (35 obras) · Sports, Gender, and Society (33 obras) · History (32 obras) · Law (30 obras) · Law (27 obras) · Art (26 obras) · Sport and Mega-Event Impacts (25 obras) · Gender Studies (24 obras)