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).
Anna Bothe Jespersen
Anna is interested in Northern Irish English, and in the interplay between the way Belfasters speak and their socio-political orientations. Among other things, she wants to know whether and when unionists make use of Southern British English dialect features, and whether nationalists exaggerate the more dialectal aspects of their Irish English. Anna is currently a postdoc at the Department of English at AU. She studied for her PhD at the University of Cambridge, where she mapped out the dialectal differences between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Sydneysiders, and holds Master's degrees in English and Phonetics from the University of Copenhagen and UCL.
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 19th-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.
Daniel Watson
Daniel Watson holds a PhD in Medieval Irish from the National University of Ireland, Maynooth (2018), and an MA in Classics from Dalhousie University, Canada (2013). He has previously held a visiting fellowship sponsored by the DAAD at the Philipps-Universität Marburg, in Keltologie (2016), and was an Assistant Lecturer in the Department of Early Irish, Maynooth, before his appointment as an O’Donovan Scholar at the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies (DIAS) in 2019. In 2020 he was awarded the Johann-Kaspar-Zeuss-Prize for the best PhD in Celtic Studies by the Societas Celtologica Europaea. Dr. Watson is a researcher on the ERC project CLIC, with particular expertise in Neoplatonic philosophy and the vernacular philosophy of early medieval Ireland on which he has published several article. A forthcoming monograph traces Neoplatonic influences in Irish vernacular philosophy of the period c. 900-1200.
Graham Butler
Graham Butler (B.A., LL.M., Ph.D.) is Associate Professor of Law at Aarhus University, Denmark. His research and scholarship focuses on various aspects of European Union law, including EU constitutional law, EU internal market law, EU external relations law, EU administrative law, and EU procedural law.
He is the author/editor of several books, Shaping EU Law the British Way: UK Advocates General at the Court of Justice of the European Union (Oxford: Hart Publishing/Bloomsbury, 2022) (ed, w/ Adam Lazowski), EU External Relations Law: The Cases in Context (Oxford: Hart Publishing/Bloomsbury, 2022) (ed, w/ Ramses A. Wessel), and Constitutional Law of the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy (Oxford: Hart Publishing/Bloomsbury, 2019).
His research has been published in the leading academic law reviews and journals in European law, including the Common Market Law Review, European Law Review, European Constitutional Law Review, European Public Law, Maastricht Journal of European and Comparative Law, European Foreign Affairs Review, European Business Law Review, the Cambridge Yearbook of European Legal Studies, the Yearbook of European Law, Legal Issues of Economic Integration, the Columbia Journal of European Law, Fordham International Law Journal, Nordic Journal of International Law, the Journal of International and Comparative Law, the Journal of European Public Policy, the Nordic Journal of European Law, International Organizations Law Review, the Irish Jurist, the Dublin University Law Journal, the Max Planck Encyclopedia of Comparative Constitutional Law, amongst others. He has also contributed to several edited volumes and collections published by Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Hart Publishing, Bloomsbury, Edward Elgar Publishing, Routledge, Intersentia, and more.
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 an Associate Professor in the Department of Archaeology and Heritage at Aarhus University. 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’). She is currently the secretary of Contemporary and Historical Archaeology in Theory (CHAT) and will be hosting the first CHAT conference in Scandinavia in October 2018 ('Agency, Action and Advocacy'). Laura McAtackney is the co-ordinator of the MA in Sustainable Heritage Management.
Ronan Crowley
Ronan Crowley received his PhD in English from the University at Buffalo in 2014, after completing an M. Litt in English (2008) and a BA in English and Philosophy (2003), both at Trinity College Dublin. From 2014 to 2016, he was Humboldt Research Fellow at Universität Passau and, from 2017 to 2020, was FWO Marie Curie Fellow at Universiteit Antwerpen. In 2021 he was elected Vice President of the International James Joyce Foundation. He has published extensively on Irish modernism and the revival, textual scholarship, and book history, including two co-edited volumes on James Joyce, digital editions of Ulysses and of Joyce’s letters and close to thirty articles and book chapters. On the ERC project CLIC, Dr. Crowley examines James Joyce’s use of Homeric parallels in Ulysses, and the impact of Joyce’s migrations on this text, drawing on drafts and notebooks to reconstruct Joyce’s wartime access to classical scholarship on the Continent.
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.
