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 eight books, most recently Classics and Irish Politics, 1916-2016 (Oxford University Press, 2020) and Classical Antiquity and Medieval Ireland (Bloomsbury, 2024).
Stephen Joyce
Stephen Joyce is Associate Director of the Centre for Irish Studies at Aarhus and 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.
Ann Carroll Boegh
Ann Carroll Boegh is International Coordinator and Academic Advisor at Aarhus University, overseeing many student exchanges with our partner Irish universities. Born and raised in west Limerick, she taught in Carlow before moving to the US and later to Aarhus, Denmark. She was one of the fortunate colleagues here already in 1996, who had the opportunity of attending Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney’s outdoor poetry reading of ‘The Tollund Man’ in Silkeborg, where he is housed, with musical accompaniment by Liam O’Flynn. It was so electrifying that, thankfully, no one was distracted when her three-year old son crawled on to the red carpet and positioned himself next to Queen Margrethe! The bog landscape, which preserved the Tollund man, is an important point of contact between Denmark and Ireland, and Ann continues in her tireless efforts to forge new opportunities for exchange between the two countries.
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.
Antoinette Fage-Butler
Antoinette Fage-Butler is Associate Professor at the Department of English. She studied Irish Gaelic and English at University College, Cork and Anglo-Irish Literature at Trinity College, Dublin, and has been interested in the representation of nature in Irish literature – from Pangur Bán, the agile white cat in the monk’s poem penned in Old Irish, to the spirituality of nature in W. B. Yeats’ poems, and the wild seas that form the backdrop of J. M. Synge’s play Riders to the Sea. Her research specialism has evolved into a focus on scientific/public communication about biodiversity and climate change, preserving her fascination for the natural environment which is rooted in her growing up in Co. Cork.
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.
Sara Dybris McQuaid
Sara Dybris McQuaid (PhD) is Associate Professor in British and Irish History, Society and Culture at Aarhus University. As a contemporary historian and political scientist, she works mostly across the interdisciplinary fields of peace and conflict studies and memory studies. Her research pivots around how collectives remember, forget and archive their past, particularly as part of conflict and peacebuilding processes and in the context of the ‘post-conflict’ peace process in Northern Ireland. She is currently working on a book entitled “Administrations of Memory and the Politics of the “post-“: Northern Ireland 1994-2024. She was Director for the Centre for Irish Studies from 2012 to 2021, where she organised academic seminar series as well as public facing debates, exhibitions, a “Troubles” film festival and the podcast series “Reimagining Ireland” in collaboration with external stakeholders. She teaches on the BA in Humanities and Conflict and the MA in Intercultural Studies at AU. She is a founding member of the Centre for Resolution of International Conflicts at University of Copenhagen and was a co-director of the working group “Transformations of Conflict” in the COST action Slow Memory: Transformative Practices for Times of Uneven and Accelerating Change from 2021-2024.
Tanja Kanne Wadsholt
Tanja Kanne Wadsholt (PhD) is a Teaching Associate Professor at the Department of English at Aarhus University. She holds a degree in English and Irish Studies from the same institution. During her studies, she developed a particular interest in Irish cultural nationalism and the works of W. B. Yeats, Colm Tóibín, and John Banville. While her current research focuses on the sociology of knowledge, she remains deeply engaged with Irish literature and culture – an interest she also brings to life as a tour guide for Danes visiting Ireland.
