Isabelle Torrance

Isabelle Torrance is Director of the Centre for Irish Studies at Aarhus and Principal Investigator for the ERC-funded project Classical Influences and Irish Culture (CLIC). She is Professor of Classical Reception in English and Other Modern European Literatures and Cultures at Aarhus University. Torrance earned her PhD in Classics from Trinity College Dublin in 2004 and has previously held teaching and research positions at Trinity College Dublin, the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, the University of Nottingham, the University of Notre Dame (where she was a tenured Associate Professor of Classics), and the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies; she has also visited Stanford University on an invited fellowship. In 2021 she was awarded the inaugural Victor Albeck prize for early career research by Aarhus University's Research Foundation. Publications include numerous articles on classical literature and its reception and seven books, most recently Classics and Irish Politics, 1916-2016 (Oxford University Press, 2020).

Annemarie Majlund Jensen

Annemarie's interests cluster around the role of culture in conflict, conflict transformation and resolution. She has worked ethnographically on these and related issues in Belfast, and on the relationship between conflict transformation, peacebuilding and European integration in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Belgrade, Serbia. Annemarie is currently developing a research project on soldiers' memories of conflict in Northern Ireland considered in relation to wider societal debates on "dealing with the past", as it were. She is a Visual Anthropologist with a background in European Studies holding Master's degrees from the University of Manchester and Aarhus University now based at the Centre for Irish Studies in Aarhus where she is affiliated as a PhD student.  

Caleb de Jong

Caleb de Jong trained in Canada, completing MA degrees in Literary Studies at Ryerson University (2018) and in Religious Studies at McMaster University (2015) after a BA in Theology from King’s University (2013). His research interests pivot around late 19^th-century literature and philosophy, and the ways in which the literary output of this period functions as a touchstone for shifting ideas about politics and religion. He is currently a researcher on the ERC project CLIC examining the influence of Neoplatonic philosophy on the Irish Literary Revival through the lens of the visionary poet/painter/philosopher George William Russell (Æ). He aims to demonstrate how Æ’s enthusiasm for Neoplatonism cannot be dissociated from his revolutionary politics nor from his religious ecumenism, and, moreover, how this enthusiasm connects him with prestigious forbears in the Irish philosophical tradition.

Ciarán Rua O’Neill

Ciarán Rua O’Neill holds a PhD in the History of Art from the University of York (2018), with a doctoral thesis on the Caryatid in Britain (1790-1914), having previously completed an MA in the History of Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art (2013), an MPhil in Textual and Visual Studies (2010) and a BA in Classical Civilization and French (2007), both at Trinity College Dublin. Since completing his PhD, he has held teaching positions at University College London (UCL) and the University of Cambridge and has published on the classically-inspired work of Frederic Leighton in the Sculpture Journal. Dr O’Neill is a researcher on the ERC project CLIC focusing on the presence of a vernacular classicism in Irish art and architecture from c.1750 to c.1950, with a particular focus on its relationship to the formation of cultural and national identities.

Jeppe Høffner 

Jeppe Høffner holds an MA in History (2019) and a BA in History and Social Science (2016) from the University of Southern Denmark. His primary research interests are in the history of European imperialism and of public opinion. He examines the interplay between these two fields in the 18^th and 19^th centuries by analysing the discursive, rhetorical and framing strategies adopted by political actors concerning Europe’s place in a world of burgeoning globalization. He researches on the ERC project CLIC investigating the newspaper culture of Ireland to show how diverse Irish voices engaged with imperial Britain, in different ways, through the lens of ancient Rome. 

Laura McAtackney

Laura McAtackney is Professor in Heritage Studies at Aarhus University and Professor in Radical Humanities Laboratory and Archaeology at University College Cork. She is an archaeologist by training but also researches in the areas of heritage, history and urban planning. She has worked on various materializations of conflict in Ireland, South Africa and the Caribbean including two long-term studies of historic political prisons. Outputs from archaeological studies on prisons including a monograph on Long Kesh / Maze prison in Northern Ireland (An Archaeology of the Troubles, 2014) and a website on female experiences of imprisonment at Kilmainham Gaol (‘Following the Fighters?’: female, political imprisonment in early-20^th century Ireland). She has co-curated a number of exhibitions relating to her work on imprisonment in Ireland during the revolutionary period (including 'Hunger Strike: Ireland 1877-1981’). 

Sara Dybris McQuaid

Sara Dybris McQuaid (PhD) was Director for the Centre for Irish Studies from 2012 to 2021. She is Associate Professor in British and Irish History, Society and Culture at Aarhus University and a core research partner in Centre for Resolution of International Conflicts at Copenhagen University. Her research pivots around how collectives remember, forget and archive their past, particularly as part of conflict and peace building processes. She is often working on Ireland and is particularly interested in 'multi-level memory governance', where transnational, national and local cultural actors, processes, products and practices shape each other. She teaches on the English Degree Programme and the MA in intercultural Studies. 

Stephen Joyce

Stephen Joyce is Associate Professor at the English Department, where he teaches media, literature, and cultural studies. His primary research focus is transmedia storytelling and he is the author of a forthcoming monograph, Transmedia Storytelling and the Apocalypse (Palgrave Macmillan 2018). He has also written articles on screen tourism in Ireland and presented research on the transnational development of Irish film, with its deep industrial and cultural links to British and American cinema. He was acting director of the CISA in the autumn/winter of 2017, when he hosted a series of talks and screenings on contemporary Irish film. He originally comes from Tipperary in Ireland, and yes, it is a long way.