People
Steering Committee
- Christine Bonnin, Alexander Dukalskis (Director), Mary Gallagher, Helen Lewis, Steffen Rimner
Members
Christine Bonnin
Dr Christine Bonnin, Ph.D. (McGill University) is an Assistant Professor in the School of Geography. Her research examines the livelihoods, coping, resilience and food security of socio-economically marginalised groups in Southeast Asia: Vietnam, the Philippines, southwestern China.
She is the lead investigator on an Irish Aid (VIBE programme) funded project in collaboration with Hanoi University and Thai Nguyen University of Agriculture and Forestry on ‘Interdisciplinary Capacity Building on Climate-Change Research and Education’.
Christine is co-author of Frontier Livelihoods: Hmong in the Sino-Vietnamese Borderlands (University of Washington Press, 2015).
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Sam Brazys
Samuel Brazys is Associate Professor in the School of Politics and International Relations (SPIRe) at University College Dublin. He completed his PhD at Indiana University (IN, USA) and Editor of the Journal of International Development. Prior to coming to UCD he worked as an Economic Adviser to the Federated States of Micronesia and taught at the College of William and Mary (VA, USA).
His work focuses on the nexus between international political economy and development and has appeared, or is forthcoming, in the Chinese Journal of International Politics, Economics and Politics, Electoral Studies, the European Journal of Political Research, the European Journal of Development Research, the International Political Science Review, International Studies Quarterly, the Journal of Democracy, the Journal of Development Studies, New Political Economy, Perspectives on Politics, the Review of International Organizations, the Review of International Political Economy, the Review of International Studies, and Third World Quarterly among other outlets. He has published on Chinese foreign policy, aid, and perceptions of corruption associated with Chinese foreign aid programs.
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Sarah Comyn
Dr Sarah Comyn is an Assistant Professor and Ad Astra Fellow in the School of English, Drama and Film. Her current research examines nineteenth-century literature in the southern hemisphere with a particular focus on the literary communities formed on the goldfields of Australia.
She has recently published Political Economy and the Novel: A Literary History of “Homo Economicus” (2018), and Early Public Libraries and Colonial Citizenship in the British Southern Hemisphere (2019: with Lara Atkin, Porscha Fermanis and Nathan Garvey). With Porscha Fermanis she has edited Worlding the South: Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture and the Southern Settler Colonies (Manchester University Press, forthcoming in 2021). She is currently working on a monograph entitled A New Reading Public: The Mechanics’ Institute on the Victorian Goldfields.
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Treasa De Loughry
Treasa De Loughry is a Lecturer/ Assistant Professor (Ad Astra Fellow) in World Literature in the School of English, Drama and Film; and a member of the UCD Humanities Institute and the UCD Earth Institute. Her main research interests are the study of environmental humanities in world and postcolonial literature, especially around issues of energy, waste, pollution, and food. Treasa has numerous publications in press or forthcoming on South Asian, South East Asian, and diasporic Asian authors such as Rana Dasgupta, Salman Rushdie, Karen Tei Yamashita, Khamsing Srinawk, and Chart Korbjiti, in relation to world literature, economic crisis, and eco-modernisation regimes.
Her first monograph The Global Novel and Capitalism in Crisis - Contemporary Literary Narratives was published in the Palgrave Macmillan 'New Comparisons in World Literature' series in 2020, and her second book project focuses on global cultural registrations of waste work and dismantling, including sites in India and China.
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Alexander Dukalskis
Dr Alexander Dukalskis, Ph.D. (University of Notre Dame), is an Associate Professor in the School of Politics and International Relations. His research and teaching interests include authoritarianism, Asian politics, and human rights. His work has been published in several leading political science journals, including Government & Opposition, Review of International Studies, Chinese Journal of International Politics, Journal of Peace Research, and Democratization.
His first book, The Authoritarian Public Sphere: Legitimation and Autocratic Power in North Korea, Burma, and China, was published in 2017. His second book, titled Making the World Safe for Dictatorship was published by Oxford University Press in 2021. In 2020-2021 he was a China Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center.
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Porscha Fermanis
Prof Porscha Fermanis, Ph.D. (Oxford), is Professor in the UCD School of English, Drama, and Film. Her current research interests include settler colonialism in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Southeast Asia; colonial book history; settler fiction; southern theory; and lateral south-south relations in the nineteenth century. She is the principal investigator of the European Research Council funded project 'SouthHem': https://www.ucd.ie/southhem/
Prof. Fermanis' latest book is Worlding the South: Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture and the Southern Settler Colonies (ed. with Sarah Comyn, Manchester UP, 2021) and Romantic Pasts: History, Fiction, and Feeling in Britain, 1790-1850 (Edinburgh UP, 2022). She is currently working on a monograph entitled Southern Settler Fiction and the Transcolonial Imaginary, 1820-1890.
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Mary Gallagher
Mary Gallagher teaches French and Francophone Studies in UCD’s School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics. Her research engages with Asia-Pacific matters through three current projects. Her work on Greek-born, Dublin-raised author Lafcadio Hearn studies how Hearn’s late nineteenth-century work on Japan’s stories relates to his writings on the creolised worlds of the post-slavery, post-plantation US and Caribbean. She has published several articles on Hearn and has lectured on his work in Japan, as well as in Ireland, France, and the US. She also works on the place of ‘French Indochina’ in the writings of Marguerite Duras, a French writer born and raised in Saigon, and she is supervising a PhD comparing the poetics of return in the work of two contemporary Francophone authors: Vietnamese novelist Anna Moï and Haitian writer Dany Laferrière.
Finally, she is currently exploring a sub-literary nexus of nineteenth-century colonial relations linking the Irish midlands, the Caribbean, and the Pacific (specifically the Penal Colony of New South Wales).
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Kieran Gaya
Kieran Gaya was born in Ireland of Mauritian parents and spent his formative years in Asia, Africa as well as Europe. He holds a professional degree in Architecture as well as graduate ones from the USA and Switzerland obtained while residing in Italy. His current research focuses on the architectural choices associated with capital building in nations that acquired statehood in the 20th century. He focuses more specifically on the built environment of Islamabad in Pakistan where the architects were required to integrate modern visual languages into their design ultimately intended to represent a progressive Islamic nation.
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Kathleen James-Chakraborty
Prof. Kathleen James-Chakraborty is a professor of art history. While Prof. James-Chakraborty is primarily a historian of modern German and American architecture, she has published on South Asia, including in Architecture since 1400 (University of Minnesota, 2016) and edited India in Art in Ireland (Routledge, 2016).
Her former and current doctoral students have written or are writing about modern architecture and urbanism in East and South Asia.
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Yoo Sun Jung
Dr Yoo Sun Jung is a Lecturer/Assistant Professor in the School of Politics and International Relations at UCD. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Texas A&M University and an M.S. in Economics at Purdue university. She studies the political economy of international trade and investment with a focus on using both game theoretic models and empirical analysis. She is particularly interested in how international institutions and international economic relations shape how governments interact with each other and with firms.
Her work has been published in Journal of Politics, the Stata Journal, and Electoral Studies across several fields. She recently conducted survey experiments in South Korea to explore how voters learn new information about the incumbent through the recent global COVID-19 pandemic.
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Naonori Kodate
Dr Naonori Kodate (Ph.D., London School of Economics and Political Science), is an Associate Professor in Social Policy and founding Director of UCD Centre for Japanese Studies (UCD-JaSt).
He is also affiliated to the University of Tokyo, Hokkaido University and la Fondation France-Japon de l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales. He taught “Comparative Public Policy: Japan and the West” at Universität Potsdam and Hokkaido University, and is currently a module coordinator for “Global Social Policy” and "Comparing Healthcare Systems" in UCD.
His research covers science, technology and society, particularly in the use of eHealth (e.g. care robots). His books include Japanese Women in Science and Engineering: History and Policy Change (Routledge, 2015) and Systems Thinking for Global Health (co-edited with Larkin, Vallières and Mannan. Oxford University Press, forthcoming)
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Helen Lewis
Dr Helen Lewis, PhD (University of Cambridge) is an Associate Professor in the School of Archaeology. Her Asian research is focused on prehistory and geoarchaeology, conducting excavations and applied soil micromorphology at sites in Southeast Asia, including the Philippines, Japan, Laos and Malaysian Borneo.
She is the co-director of the Palawan Island Palaeohistoric Research Project (2004-present), a joint international project with the Archaeological Studies Program, UP Diliman. Helen was Chair of the 2012 European Association of Southeast Asian Archaeologists international conference, held in Dublin. She has also carried out research in the UK, Denmark, Belgium, Ireland, and India, and is a member of the Developing International Geoarchaeology Committee. Her publications can be found on her UCD homepage:
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Linette Lim
Linette Lim is a PhD student at the School of Politics and International Relations. Her research encompasses authoritarian politics and media control in Asia, and Chinese nationalism. Prior to coming to UCD, she was the Shanghai-based correspondent with the Singapore public broadcaster, covering economic and political news in Greater China. Key assignments included the annual "Two Sessions" meetings in Beijing, the anti-government protests in Hong Kong in 2019, and the Taiwan elections in 2020. Outside of journalism, she has held roles in corporate communications, dealing with media and government officials. She completed her undergraduate and postgraduate studies at the Singapore Management University and King’s College London respectively.
Hasheem Mannan
Hasheem Mannan joined the School of Nursing, Midwifery, and Health Systems as Senior Lecturer in January 2015. Hasheem completed his PhD on disability policy and family studies at the University of Kansas, USA in 2005. Hasheem's areas of expertise include content analysis of health policies; human resources for health and service delivery; disability measurement and statistics; and social inclusion.
He has provided research support and knowledge management services to a range of projects for the World Health Organization, UNICEF, International Labour Office, United Nations Education, Science and Cultural Organization, and United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, and United Nations Development Program.
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Peter Moran
Dr. Peter Moran is Ireland's leading authority on Javanese gamelan music. He has been teaching and performing Javanese gamelan for over 20 years, and his original compositions in the genre have been performed across Ireland, England, America and Indonesia. He is the founder and director of numerous gamelan groups in Dublin, including the UCD Gamelan Orchestra (co-founded with Dr. Jaime Jones), the experimental composers' ensemble Gamelan Nua, and the National Concert Hall Gamelan Orchestra, Kyai Jati Roso, which was received as a gift to the Irish people from His Royal Highness Sultan Hamengkubuwono X of Yogyakarta, Java.
Peter has led his ensemble to perform at some of Ireland's biggest festivals, including the Electric Picnic, the Bray Jazz Festival, the Kaleidoscope Festival, and Beyond the Pale, as well as an annual performance in the National Concert Hall, Dublin. Performances in Indonesia have included the 2014 Yogyakarta International Performing Arts Festival, and also the 2018 International Gamelan Festival in Surakarta.
Peter has worked alongside UCD Global to establish a Memorandum of Understanding between UCD and the Indonesian Institute for the Arts Yogyakarta, which has helped to create a Gamelan Artist-in-Residence Scheme for visiting guests from Java. We have hosted two artistic residencies to date, Dr. Su Maryono in 2017, and Dr. Ignatius Sumiyoto in 2019-2020.
Very active in education, outreach and public engagement, Peter also delivers regular gamelan workshops for schools, community groups, cultural days, and staff and student clubs and societies. Most recently, he has been exploring the fusion of gamelan and traditional Irish music in collaboration with Irish music legend Dónal Lunny.
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William Mulligan
William Mulligan works on the history of international relations before 1914, including European imperial expansion, collaborations, and rivalries in the Asia-Pacific region in the 19th and 20th centuries.
He has supervised graduate dissertations on cultural exchange and railways in China, on European intervention in the aftermath of the Sino-Japanese War of 1894/5, and on humanitarians and indentured labour regimes in the Pacific and in Queensland.
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Maika Nguyen
Maika Nguyen is a BA and MA graduate of Charles University in Prague and she has also studied at the University of Paris 4 (Sorbonne) and at Trinity College Dublin. She is currently a PhD candidate in UCD’s School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics. Her doctoral project, entitled ‘Writing Home? Haiti and Vietnam in Postcolonial Autofiction in French’ centres on the ‘home(less) writing’ of two contemporary migrant authors who work in French: Anna Moï, originally from Vietnam and Dany Laferrière, originally from Haiti. Both writers engage with the idea of ‘home’ from a displaced position. The project draws upon Postcolonial, Memory, Trauma and Area studies to explore how mobility inflects the migrant writer’s perception of their ‘original’ home.
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Hugo O’Donnell
A UCD graduate in Physics and Education, Hugo first joined UCD AV Centre (now part of IT Services) and then in 1990 the newly created Language Centre in Newman. His early role included preparing the successful EU submission to construct Ireland’s first purpose-built language centre; he was a member of the Daedalus project design team. He developed the educational technology systems to support the expansion of English and foreign language teaching in particular during UCD’s adoption of semesterisation (Horizons). He led the diversification of ALC's student cohorts beyond Europe to include the two Koreas, Japan, China and Central Asia. Hugo is the founder of Ireland’s National Japanese Festival, 'Experience Japan', for which he received a Japanese Minister for Foreign Affairs award. He is/has been a member of many bodies including UCD Governing Authority, executive member of the AULC [Association of University Language Communities in the UK & Ireland] and the UCD SIPTU Section Committee.
Robert Power
Dr. Robert C. Power is an archaeobotanist in the School of Archaeology at UCD. His work concerns a variety of regions including Japan. The theme of this work is focused on understanding hunter-gatherer and early economies, particularly plant use using microbotanical remains, namely phytoliths in Japan. His work has been published in the Journal of Human Evolution, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Journal of Archaeological Science across several fields.
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Fangzhe Qiu
Fangzhe Qiu received his PhD in Early and Medieval Irish from University College Cork in 2015. He also holds an MPhil in Celtic Studies from the University of Oxford, and BA in Law and Philosophy from Peking University. He worked at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies and Maynooth University before he joined University College Dublin as a lecturer in 2020.
Fangzhe’s main research interest is in medieval Irish language and early Irish law. Being a native speaker of Cantonese, Mandarin and understanding Min, Uyghur and Turkish, he is also interested in Sino-Tibetan and Turkic linguistics.
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Steffen Rimner
Steffen Rimner is Assistant Professor in the History of International Affairs and Ad Astra Fellow. His work focuses on Chinese, Japanese and US engagements with international regimes across the twentieth century. He studied at t the University of Konstanz (B.A.), Yale University and Harvard University (A.M., Ph.D.) and held affiliations at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard, International Security Studies at Yale, the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford, the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia, the Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies at Waseda and the Institute for the Advanced Studies on Asia at the University of Tokyo. He is the author of Opium’s Long Shadow: From Asian Revolt to Global Drug Control (Harvard University Press, 2018) and written for Asia Pacific in the Age of Globalisation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Global Publics: Their Power and Their Limits, 1870-1990 (Oxford University Press, 2020), the Journal of Global History, Epicenter (Weatherhead Center for International Affairs), the Journal of the British Academy and Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (forthcoming).
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Laëtitia Saint-Loubert
Laëtitia Saint-Loubert is an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at University College Dublin. She is currently working on a research project entitled ‘Rethinking Translation Studies from Caribbean Meridians: Towards an Ecosystemic Approach’. Her research interests include Caribbean and Indian Ocean literature and critical thought, (post/decolonial) translation, bibliodiversity and decolonial ecocriticism.
Her monograph, The Caribbean in Translation: Remapping Thresholds of Dislocation (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2020), focused on twentieth- and twenty-first-century Caribbean literature in translation and further explored South-South connections between the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean and the Pacific.
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Manfa Sanogo
Manfa Sanogo holds an IRC Postdoctoral Research fellowship in the School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics. He is a graduate of the Universities of Abidjan (Ivory Coast) and Wisconsin-Milwaukee and took his doctorate in 2020 at Florida State University. His post-doctoral research centres on Indian Ocean literature: in other words, island writing from Madagascar and the Mascarenes. His project studies Malagasy and Indian Ocean literatures in French, with particular attention to the triangular flow and exchange of aesthetic practices within these (post-)colonial spaces and between these spaces and France. He is studying how the mobility of authors and of writing from and around the creolized Indian Ocean islands contributed to the rejuvenation and decolonization of French literature, challenging colonial assumptions of cultural and linguistic hierarchy not just within the Francosphere but more widely on the world stage.
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Krishna Vadlamannati
Krishna Vadlamannati is Associate Professor in the School of Politics and International Relations (SPIRe), University College Dublin (UCD), Dublin, Ireland. Krishna completed his PhD in Economics from University of Heidelberg, Germany in September 2012. Krishna holds Masters degree in Applied Economics from University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain; and also MBA and a Bachelors degree in Commerce (Honours) from India. Prior to coming to UCD he served as Junior Professor at the Norwegian University of Science & Technology (NTNU), (Norway) and Post doctoral fellow at the University of Goettingen (Germany). He is a visiting fellow at Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) and a board member of editorial committee of Journal of Peace Research (JPR) and International Area Studies Review (IASR).
He is currently serving as an Editor-in-Chief of Journal of International Development. He has published on a range of Asia-related topics including Indian development aid program, Chinese aid, China led initiatives such as Belt and Road and AIIB, and also studies on FDI, insurgency, and corruption in India in some of the top outlets namely, Journal of Development Economics, World Development, Oxford Economic Papers, International Studies Quarterly, Energy Policy, Journal of Peace Research, European Journal of Political Economy, Business & Society, Regional Science and Urban Economics, Conflict Management and Peace Science, among several others.
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Ernesto Vasquez del Aguila
Dr. Ernesto Vasquez del Aguila is an Assistant Professor/Ad Astra Fellow at the School of Social Policy, Social Work and Social Justice. By background he is a medical anthropologist with a PhD from Columbia University, New York. He has published on areas of sexual and reproductive rights; transnational migration; global health; masculinities; sexualities and non-discrimination. He received the Award for Excellence in Global Health, from the School of Public Health, Columbia University. He co-edited Unsustainable Institutions of Men: Transnational Dispersed Centres, Gender Power, Contradictions (Routledge 2019) and is the author of Being a Man in a Transnational World: The Masculinity and Sexuality of Migration (Routledge 2014). He has previously taught at Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, Lima; Georgetown University, Washington, DC; and at the University of the Philippines, Manila.
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Visiting Fellow, Autumn 2023
Alessia Paolillo
Alessia Paolillo is a Ph.D. candidate at Sapienza University of Rome in the department of 
Civilizations of Asia and Africa. Alessia's research is about political language and China's foreign policy. As a consequence of global climate change, the Chinese leadership has recognized, in the last 30 years, the need for a green turn in its development strategy, and it has made ecological recovery and security a national priority. In this complex and multifaceted context, “Ecological Civilization” (shēngtài wénmíng - 生态文明) became the leadership’s preferred policy framework for green development. It is a model of sustainable development, “with Chinese characteristics” designed not only for the Chinese population, but for the entire world. For this reason, it has been promoted by the Chinese government in many international arenas and today Ecological Civilization is presented in English on the UN Environment Program website as “an ethical morality and ideology which realizes harmonious co-existence and sustainable development both among people and between them and nature and society, reflecting the progress of civilization”. In this context, the present study ought to analyse how Ecological Civilization is portrayed to the international audiences through the press releases of the Chinese Foreign Affairs Ministry’s spokespersons, via the use of Corpus Linguistic and Critical Discourse Analysis.