ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Thomas O’Connor

Prof Thomas O'Connor is director of the Maynooth University Arts and Humanities Institute. He is a member of the Maynooth University History department and holds a PhD from the Sorbonne. His research interests are in early modern European migration and religion, especially Jansenism, Inquisitions, censorship, ideological controls, social discipline and religious conversion. He is co-director of the Irish in Europe Project and editor of the history sources journal, Archivium Hibernicum. He is a member of the Irish Manuscripts Commission and of the Fondation Irlandaise (Paris). He has published several monographs in early modern European history, the most recent on the Iberian Inquisition with Palgrave in 2016. He has edited and co-edited four volumes in the Irish in Europe series, and contributed to numerous scholarly periodicals and essay collections. He has edited a collection of essays on abroad colleges in early modern Europe, which appeared with Manchester University Press in late 2017. Most recently, he has co-edited, for Brill, an essay collection presenting new archival research on individual Catholic colleges in seventeenth and eighteenth-century Europe.

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Mícheál Mac Craith OFM

Prof Mícheál Mac Craith is a Franciscan priest who lectured in Modern Irish at the National University of Ireland, Galway from 1977 until his retirement in August 2011. From 1997 until his retirement, he held the established chair of Modern Irish. He studied in Galway, Rome and Louvain. He authored and co-authored books on Gaelic poetry. He is interested in the Renaissance, Counter-Reformation literature, Irish communities in exile in the early modern period, Jacobitism, Ossianism and contemporary Gaelic literature, and has published extensively in these areas. In 1997 he was awarded a Visiting Fellowship in the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. In 2003 he was Visiting Fellow at St Edmund’s College Cambridge and Associate Research Fellow at the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at the University of Cambridge. In 2008 the Irish Research Council in the Humanities and Social Sciences awarded him a Senior Research Fellowship to investigate the period spent by the exiled earls, O’ Neill and O’ Donnell, in Rome. In 2011 he was appointed Guardian of Collegio S. Isidoro in Rome for six years. Since September 2017 he is resident in the Franciscan House of Studies, Dún Mhuire, Killiney, Co. Dublin. During the Fall Semester 2018 he was Visiting Naughton Fellow at the Keough Naughton Centre of Irish Studies, University of Notre Dame.

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Alison Forrestal

Prof Alison Forrestal is a Professor of History at National University of Ireland Galway (NUIG) and a Member of the Royal Irish Academy. Specialising in the history of religion during the early modern era, she has published many works on the Catholic Reformation, including the monographs Vincent de Paul, the Lazarist Mission, and French Catholic Reform (Oxford, 2017), Fathers, Pastors and Kings: Visions of Episcopacy in Seventeenth-Century France (Manchester, 2004), and Catholic Synods in Ireland, 1600-1690 (Dublin, 1998).

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Liam Chambers

Dr Liam Chambers is senior lecturer and head of the Department of History at Mary Immaculate College, Limerick, Ireland. He is a joint editor of Irish Historical Studies (May 2016–May 2021) and a member of the Irish Manuscripts Commission. His research focuses on eighteenth-century Irish history and the history of Irish migration to continental Europe, especially France. He is working on a history of the Irish colleges in Paris.

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Nora Hickey M’Sichili

Nora Hickley M’Sichili is the Director of the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris, a position she had held since 2013. She is also Chair of FICEP, the Forum the Instituts Culturels Etrangers de Paris, a body that represents the 60 Paris-based cultural centres. Previously, Nora held positions at the Mermaid Arts Centre (Director), the Lewis Glucksmann Gallery (Curator), and the Hunt Museum (Curator).

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 Grace Neville

Prof Grace Neville studied at University College Cork (BA joint first class honours in French and Irish), l’Université de Caen (where she was a French Government scholarship holder) and l’Université de Lille (doctorate). She is professor emeritus of French at UCC where she was also Vice-President for Teaching and Learning. Her research focuses inter alia on Franco-Irish relations from the medieval to the modern period. Since retiring from UCC in 2012, she has been a member/chair of numerous boards and committees in France, for instance in the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR), the Ministère de l’Enseignement Supérieur, de la Recherche et de l’Innovation, the HCERES, as well as at universities including the Sorbonne, Rennes, Cergy-Pontoise and Aix-Marseille, and also at the European Commission. She holds the Légion d’honneur and the Palmes Académiques.

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Timothy G. McMahon

Dr Timothy G. McMahon is associate professor of history at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA, and the Past President of the American Conference for Irish Studies. Tim received his MA (1994) and PhD (2001) from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is a social historian with interests in nationalism and national identity, popular culture (especially popular religion), and Empire. He is the author of Grand Opportunity: The Gaelic Revival and Irish Society, 1893-1910 (2008) and editor of Pádraig Ó Fathaigh’s War of Independence: Recollections of a Galway Gaelic Leaguer (2000) and co-editor of Ireland in an Imperial World: Citizenship, Opportunism, and Subversion (2017). In 2011, he was the Rev. William Neenan, S.J., Visiting Fellow at Boston College, Ireland, and in 2018, he was a Visiting Research Professor at the Institute of Irish Studies at Queen’s University, Belfast. He is currently writing a book with the working title of Irish Partition and the Boundaries of Identity.

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James Creedon

James Creedon is an Irish broadcast journalist and documentary filmmaker based in Paris since 2005. Since almost its inception, he has been part of the France 24 team. He presents a range of shows MediaWatch, Tech 24, Eye on Africa and regular news bulletins including prime time evening show Live From Paris. Elsewhere, he also recently finished a feature-length documentary film, directed and produced independently. “Thanks to your Noble Shadow” premiered at the Galway Film Fleadh in 2017. In 2019, a 52-minute version was completed, renamed “75 Years in Japan.” The documentary is about James’s relative Jennie O’Sullivan, one of Ireland's last missionary nuns, who returned to her homeland after 75 years in Japan.

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 Jérôme aan de Wiel

Dr Jérôme aan de Wiel is Lecturer in Modern European History and European Studies in UCC. His research interests are broadly the First World War, Second World War, Cold War, and European integration, particularly diplomatic, political, intelligence, religious and humanitarian aspects. He is the author of The Catholic Church in Ireland, 1914-1918; War and Politics (2003), The Irish Factor, 1899-1919; Ireland's Strategic and Diplomatic Importance for Foreign Powers (2008), Ireland Through European Eyes; Western Europe, the EEC and Ireland, 1945-1973 (joint editor, 2013) and East German Intelligence and Ireland, 1949-90; Espionage, Terrorism and Diplomacy (2015). His forthcoming book Ireland's Helping Hand to Europe, 1945-1950; Combatting Hunger from Normandy to Tirana will be published in 2021 by Central European University Press in Budapest. He has published articles in The International History Review, Intelligence and National Security, Etudes irlandaises, The Irish Sword and Guerres mondiales et conflits contemporains among others.

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Dermot Keogh

Prof Dermot Keogh is emeritus Professor of History at University College where he also held the chair in European Integration Studies.  He is a member of the Royal Irish Academy and has twice held fellowships at the Woodrow Wilson Centre, Washington DC in 1988 and 1991. He was Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Irish Studies, Queen’s, Belfast in 1995/6 and the visiting Burns Scholar at Boston College in 2011/2. He received an honorary doctorate from the Universidad del Salvador, Buenos Aires, in 2018 where he has been a visiting professor for a number of years.  Among Professor Keogh’s books are Jews in Twentieth Century Ireland; Twentieth Century Ireland – Nation and State; The Vatican, the Bishops and Irish Politics 1919-1939; Ireland and the Vatican and the Making of the Irish Constitution. He published in Spanish La Independencia de Irlanda: la conexion argentina in 2016 and his new book Ireland and Argentina in the Twentieth Century: Diaspora, Diplomacy, Dictatorship, Human Rights and the Falklands/Malvinas Crisis will appear in Spanish and in English in 2021/2.

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Alexandra Slaby

Dr Alexandra Slaby is an Associate Professor at the University of Caen Normandy where she teaches British, Irish and South African civilization. She is half-South African. She published L’Etat et la culture en Irlande (Caen UP, 2010) prefaced by Michael D. Higgins. She is a former editor of Etudes Irlandaises (2011-2017) and was commissioned to write an Histoire de l'Irlande de 1912 à nos jours (Paris: Tallandier, 2016, 2021). She is now researching Irish Catholic presence in South Africa and writing the first biography of Owen Cardinal McCann.

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 Ciarán Reilly

Dr Ciaran Reilly is an historian of nineteenth & twentieth century Irish history based at Maynooth University. His research interests include the Great Irish Famine; country houses and landed estates, and the Irish diaspora, with a particular focus on South Africa. He is the author of a number of books including Capard: An Irish country house & estate (2019); The Irish Land Agent, 1830-60: the Case of King’s County (2014); Strokestown and the Great Irish Famine (2014) and John Plunket Joly and the Great Famine in King’s County (2012).

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Eamon Maher

Dr Eamon Maher is Director of the national Centre for Franco-Irish Studies in TU Dublin and General Editor of two book series with Peter Lang, Reimagining Ireland and Studies in Franco-Irish Studies. His main area of interest is the depiction of Catholicism in 20th-century fiction and he is currently preparing a monograph on the Catholic Novel. His most recent publication, co-edited with Eugene O'Brien, is Reimagining Irish Studies for the Twenty-First Century, which is the landmark 100th book in the Reimagining Ireland series.

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Bertrand Cardin

Prof Bertrand Cardin is the author of Colum McCann's Intertexts. 'Books Talk to One Another' (Cork University Press, 2016) in which McCann’s work is studied as a mosaic of references to and quotations from other texts. He also guest-edited a special issue of the Journal of the Short Story in English on “The 21st Century Irish Short Story” (N°63, Autumn 2014). With Alexandra Slaby, he co-edited a special issue of Etudes irlandaises: “Contemporary Issues in Irish Studies. In Memoriam Paul Brennan” (N°40-1, Spring-Summer 2015). Bertrand has also published several other books and articles about contemporary Irish novelists and short story writers.