STAFF RESEARCH INTERESTS
ACADEMIC YEAR 2008-09
Head of School: Professor Jean-Michel Picard
(French and Francophone Studies)
Medieval French epic (12th -13th centuries); medieval French theatre (13th -15th centuries); medieval hagiography; history of the language; historical phonetics; Rabelais; modern French civilisation; comparative civilisation: Ireland and France
Dr Paolo Acquaviva (Italian Studies)
Italian and general linguistics; morphology and its interface with semantics; plurals; theories of the lexicon; Distributed Morphology
Professor John Barnes (Italian Studies)
Medieval Florentine literature, especially Dante and historiography; Textual criticism; Areas of twentieth-century Italian literature, particularly Pirandello.
Dr Paola Benchi (Italian Studies)
Dr Michael Brophy (French and Francophone Studies)
Contemporary French poetry and poetics; poetry and art; the poet as critic; women poets in contemporary France; French-Canadian literature
Dr Derval Conroy (French and Francophone Studies)
17th-century literature and history of ideas; early-modern feminisms and women writers; text and image; early modern ceremonial, political thought and historiography
Dr Joana Cortez (Hispanic and Lusophone Studies)
Dr Siobhán Donovan (German Studies)
18th/19th literature and history of ideas; Music in Literature / Music and Literature; German Opera; Recent Swiss-German literature
Annette Dunne (Hispanic and Lusophone Studies)
Dr Ursula Fanning (Italian Studies)
Gender and genre; Italian women’s writing, especially nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction; Autobiographical writing; Language and gender; Feminist, literary and psychoanalytical theory; Pirandello.
Dr Annette Flynn (Hispanic and Lusophone Studies)
Spanish-American literature, especially Jorge Luis Borges; literature of the Luso-Brazilian world, especially João Guimarães Rosa; Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian cinema; film adaptations of literary texts.
Dr Monica Francioso (Italian Studies)
Contemporary Italian narrative; development of narrative theory in post-war Italy; the Italian literature of migration; postmodern novels and theories; Enrico Palandri's and Gianni Celati’s work.
Professor Anne Fuchs (German Studies)
Cultural Memory in Post-War German Discourse; Modern German Literature; German-Jewish Literature; Literary Theory; The Self and the Other in Travel Literature and German-Jewish Literature
Dr Phyllis Gaffney (French and Francophone Studies)
Medieval attitudes towards childhood, youth and age; history of childhood; 12th-century narrative verse in Old French, especially the Tristan poems; the Irish Hospital, Saint-Lô; Beckett and Saint-Lô; Roger Chauviré
Mary Gallagher (French and Francophone Studies)
Contemporary Caribbean and Canadian Writing in French; Francophone Postcolonial Theory; Creolisation and Cultural Globalisation; Saint-John Perse; Contemporary Writing in French by Women; Introspection in Modern French Fiction (esp. Paul Valéry, Marcel Proust, Colette, Marguerite Duras); Ethics and Poetics of Relation.
Dr Georg Grote (German Studies)
Modern Irish History (Literature & Nationalism); 19th and 20th Century German History; Nationalism and Internationalism as historic phenomena; Regionalism in Western Europe, History of South Tyrol in the 20th Century
Dr Theo Harden (German Studies)
Structural semantics; Contrastive studies German-English-Portuguese; Rhetoric and Pragmatics; German as a Foreign Language
Dr Eric Haywood (Italian Studies)
Italian Renaissance Descriptions of and Travellers to Ireland; Renaissance isolari; Sannazaro and Arcadia (the origin of the Arcadian myth; poets and poetry in Arcadia; the early commentators of Arcadia); Re-Writings of Boccaccio’s Griselda Story in the English-Speaking World; Neapolitan Humanism (Giovanni Pontano, Antonio De Ferrariis Galateo, Belisario Acquaviva, Agostino Nifo); Renaissance Comedy (Mandragola).
Ms Maria-Rosario Hernández (Hispanic and Lusophone Studies)
Second language teaching and learning; assessment of student learning; teaching methodologies and the professional development of teachers; materials preparation; ICT in teaching.
Dr Philip Johnston (Hispanic and Lusophone Studies)
Twentieth-century poetry, particularly Antonio Machado and the Generation of 1927; aspects of twentieth-century theatre, especially Antonio Buero Vallejo; translation.
Dr Sabine Krobb (German Studies)
Literary translation studies; intercultural narratives; German-Scandinavian literary relations; German and Austrian literature around 1900.
Professor Carmel McCarthy (Near Eastern Languages)
Issues and methodology in the textual transmission of the Hebrew Bible; Hermeneutics of biblical textual criticism; Masoretic Studies; Rabbinic, medieval and modern exegesis of the Hebrew Bible; Syriac language and literature, with special focus on fourth-century Syriac authors.
Dr Pascale McGarry (French and Francophone Studies)
Ecriture et peinture de Baudelaire à Proust; littérature fin-de-siècle dans une perspective comparatiste (littératures française et anglo-irlandaise); histoire des mentalités; expositions universelles. Jean-Philippe Toussaint
Dr Laurent Marie (French and Francophone Studies)
French Cinema; Film and Politics; Film and Society; The French Communist Party and French Cinema, Communist Film Criticism, Documentary and Political Engagement, the New Wave, Jacques Tati
Dr Emer O'Beirne (French and Francophone Studies)
Nathalie Sarraute; contemporary French fiction; the detective novel; theories of dialogue and reading; irony
Dr Deirdre O'Grady (Italian Studies)
Eighteenth-century Italian verse, drama and translation; Italian Neo-classicism; The nineteenth-century Italian novel; The Italian operatic libretto: music and literature.
Dr Síofra Pierse (French and Francophone Studies)
Voltaire’s historiography and historical writing; 18th-century French historiography,
literature and ideas (especially Voltaire); Voltaire and the Self (Je; Old Age); the 18th-century French city in literature (Voltaire; Rousseau; Restif de la Bretonne); the early modern female-authored French novel (Tencin, Riccoboni, Graffigny, Charrière; Staël).
Dr Gillian Pye (German Studies)
Contemporary German and Austrian drama; Comedy theory; Twentieth century architecture and design
Dr Vera Regan (French and Francophone Studies)
Second language acquisition; Sociolinguistics; Acquisition of French by speakers of Irish English; Variation theory; Sociolinguistic analysis of variation in French (including French-
Canadian forms); French linguistics
Dr Alison Ribeiro de Menezes (Hispanic and Lusophone Studies)
Cultural memory in late twentieth-century Spain and Portugal; contemporary Spanish and Portuguese fiction; aspects of Spanish Golden-Age literature; issues of identity and gender in literary discourse; the works of Juan Goytisolo, Luis Martín-Santos, and Carmen Martín Gaite.
Dr Jeanne Riou (German Studies)
Cultural Theory and Literature of the Enlightenment, Romantic and Modernist periods; Continental philosophy and History of Ideas
Ms María Ana Rodríguez Villaumbrales (Hispanic and Lusophone Studies)
Twentieth-century Spanish poetry; in particular Jorge Guillen; technology in the learning and teaching of languages
Dr Simone Scroth (German Studies)
Translation theory and criticism
Ego-documents (autobiography, diaries etc.)
‘Faust’ theme in literature
German as a Foreign Language
Dr Stephen Schwartz (French and Francophone Studies)
Modern and contemporary French thought; literary theory; philosophy of language and mind; theories of individualism; analytic and continental aesthetics; cultural theory; contemporary art; Mallarmé; Baudelaire; Flaubert.
Dr Douglas Smith (French and Francophone Studies)
Twentieth-century French cultural and intellectual history; twentieth-century French literature; French cinema; French cultural studies; Continental philosophy; French anthropology and sociology; French-American relations; history and theory of photography; history and theory of architecture and design; literary and cultural theory.
Dr Jeremy Squires (Hispanic and Lusophone Studies)
Modern and late nineteenth-century Peninsular literature, in particular the novel of the Franco era. Aspects of Latin-American fiction, literary theory, & green studies.
Raya Wall (French and Francophone Studies)
Language teaching and translation.
Dr Heidi Zojer (German Studies)
Translation Studies, DaF (Deutsch als Fremdsprache)-German as a Foreign Language, Language Learning and Language Acquistion
