BA (NUI); HDip in Journalism (DCU); MA (Boston College); PhD (NUI)
Senior Lecturer
Director of the Women's Studies Centre 

I graduated from University College Cork with a first in Double Honours English and then studied journalism. I joined RTÉ in 1987 but two years later I was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship and I went to study for a Masters in English at Boston College where I was awarded a distinction. I went back to UCC to write a Ph.D. dissertation on the influence of Gaelic culture on the speeches and politics of Edmund Burke (1729-1797). In 1995 I won a scholarship to study at the English Department of the University of California at Berkeley. I spent two academic years there and wrote the bulk of my dissertation while at CAL. In 1997 I joined the Women's Studies Centre at University College Dublin and have been responsible for co-ordinating and developing the humanities profile of our interdisciplinary programmes since then.
 

Even as I have developed other academic fields of interest such as the history of gender and sexuality, race science in nineteenth century Ireland and the cultural politics of emotion, I have found it impossible to stop studying and writing on Burke. He is a figure of fascination for those of us who are interested in the intersections between literary production and political engagement. Interpreting his writings and speeches demands an attentiveness to historical context, plural cultural genres and how audiences are formed as much through emotional interpellation as an appeal to rationality and these interests fuel all my intellectual enquiry.

In many ways my academic career is conventional, yet the difference is that in working in feminist and gender studies and in the School of Social Justice I have not merely been supported but encouraged in working with people who suffer social disadvantage, specifically cultural stigma. I was a co-founding member of the Irish Lesbian and Gay Archive: the IQA, now safely deposited as a living archive with the National Library of Ireland and I currently work on the advisory committee of Justice for Magdalenes.
 
I am a qualified, licensed and insured acupuncturist. I find the study and practice of acupuncture to be a wonderful complement, and sometimes antidote, to my academic pursuits.