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).
Stephen Joyce
Stephen Joyce is Associate Professor at the English Department, where he teaches media, literature, and cultural studies. His current research revolves around media franchising, transmedia world-building, and postapocalyptic narratives and he is the author of Transmedia Storytelling and the Apocalypse (Palgrave Macmillan 2018). He has also published several articles on media tourism in Ireland, Irish historical documentaries and drama series, Irish mythology, and contemporary Irish horror cinema. He originally comes from Tipperary in Ireland, and yes, it is a long way.
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.
Ciaran McDonough
Ciaran McDonough was awarded a PhD in Irish Studies from the University of Galway in 2017 and earned her MA in Irish Studies from the same institution in 2009, following a BA (Hons) in German and English from Bangor University in 2005. She has previously been a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Irish, Celtic Studies and Folklore at University College Dublin (2020-2022) and a Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellow in the Institute for History at the University of Iceland (2022-2024). Her research interests include nineteenth-century antiquarian cultures in Ireland, Iceland, Denmark, and the rest of Europe; the translations of medieval literature in the nineteenth century; comparative history of legal studies; and the intersections between English- and Irish-language culture in nineteenth-century Ireland. She has published widely in these areas. In 2024 she was awarded the Society for the Study of Nineteenth-Century Ireland essay prize.
Dominic Rainsford
Dominic Rainsford is Professor of Literature in English at Aarhus University, General Editor of Dickens Quarterly, and President of the Danish Association of English Studies. His PhD at University College London concerned James Joyce (as well as William Blake and Charles Dickens), and was published by Macmillan as Authorship, Ethics and the Reader: Blake, Dickens, Joyce (1997). He continues to be interested in Joyce, as well as other Irish writers including Wilde, Beckett and Heaney.
Feliks Levin
Feliks Levin (PhD) is a Marie-Sklodowska Curie postdoctoral fellow at School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University. He was awarded a PhD in early modern European history from the Institute of World History of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2018. His sphere of interests includes medieval and early modern ethnicity, Irish identity, early modern British composite monarchy, medieval and early modern Irish history-writing, political thought in Tudor and early Stuart Ireland, and cultural transfers in early modern Ireland including Classical influences. He is working on the project Irish Identities and Political Thought in Early Modern Historical Writing: Greek and Roman Sources concerned with two foundational pieces of seventeenth-century Irish historical writing: the Irish-language Foras Feasa ar Éirinn (Foundation of Knowledge on Ireland) by Geoffrey Keating (1580-1644) and the Neo-Latin Cambrensis Eversus (Refutation of Cambrensis) by John Lynch (1599-1677). These texts provided extensive influential narratives of Irish history alternative to the English colonial version. The project asks how and why early modern Irish authors exploited the cultural capital of classical rhetoric, history, and political thought through both Irish and Latin languages in order to fashion a distinct representation of Irish history, which underlined connections between Ireland and Britain as well as between Ireland and Europe.
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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 18th and 19th 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-20th 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.
