Director
Anne Fuchs
Anne Fuchs (MRIA, FBA) is Professor and 
Director of the UCD Humanities Institute. Internationally known for her work on German cultural memory, modernist and contemporary literature and on temporality in the 20th and 21st centuries, she has overseen major funded research projects and acts as a regular grant assessor for the German Scientific Council, the DFG, the Swiss National Fund and the ERC. As a member of the Royal Irish Academy and a Fellow of the British Academy she has served on strategic committees, such as the RIA Council, the RIA Higher Education Futures Group, the RIA Committee on Research Infrastructure, RIA Brexit Taskforce. She serves on the Scientific Advisory Board of Open Research Europe (ORE, see (opens in a new window)https://open-research-europe.ec.europa.eu/#), the EU platform for the publication of research stemming from Horizon 2020, Horizon Europe and/or Euratom funding across all subject areas. She is also Collection Advisor of the ORE Collection Transnational Literature.
(opens in a new window)ORCID | (opens in a new window)UCD RMS Profile | Short CV | List of publications
Research Lead | Transnationalising the Humanities project
Megan Kuster, currently the UCD HI Research Lead for the Transnationalising the 
Humanities (TNH) project, is a literary scholar. She has coordinated interdisciplinary, multi-institutional environmental humanities projects and has strong transhistorical and transnational research interests. In her role as the HI Research Lead, Megan will liaise with the Director of the HI, members of the TNH strand, and colleagues across UCD to develop collaborative research on TNH, including around the “Futures Imaginaries in the Age of Permacrisis” project (PI Prof Anne Fuchs). Her main research interests are the study of environmental humanities in nineteenth- and twentieth-century settler colonial and postcolonial literature, especially around issues of global natural history, mining, and labour; and contemporary collaborative creativity, particularly around practices of regeneration. She has published articles on Katherine Mansfield, and natural history collecting in nineteenth-century New Zealand in Tinakori: Critical Journal of the Katherine Mansfield Society and the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History. Her current book project works at the intersection of global Victorian and modernist studies, drawing on settler colonial frameworks and the histories of acclimatisation societies to reassess the significance of plants in fiction by women writers from Canada, New Zealand, the Caribbean, and Ireland in the late nineteenth- and early-twentieth-centuries.
Email: megan.kuster@ucd.ie
Administration
Valerie Norton has worked in UCD since early 2002 and has been manager of the UCD Humanities Institute since October 2003. Valerie reports to the Institute Director and she directs operations at the UCD Humanities Institute across multiple functions with responsibilities including research management, financial and strategic planning, office management and operational planning, IT management, HR, marketing and communications. Valerie is a member of URMAN, the University Research Managers and Administrators Network since 2014, and sat on the Board from 2016-2018. She is also a member of the UCD College of Arts and Humanities Research Advisory Committee.
Tel: +353 1 716 4690
Email: (opens in a new window)valerie.norton@ucd.ie
Ricki Schoen joined the UCD Humanities Institute in 2012 as Research Administrator for the John Hume Institute for Global Irish Studies academic research programme. She took on the role of HI Executive Administrator in 2014. Her responsibilities include organising the HI Lunchtime Seminar Series and other events at the Institute, updating the HI website and providing administrative support to the Institute Director and Institute Manager.
She joined the University Research Managers & Administrators Network (URMAN) in 2014 and was a member of the Advisory Group from 2016-2018. Having completed her BA in Geography at the University of Winnipeg and a Business Administration Diploma at the Management Institute Zurich, she went on to complete an MEconSc in European Economic and Public Affairs and subsequently an MSc in Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict at UCD. Ricki was also a staff member of the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning (IICD) from 1998-2011.
Tel: +353 1 716 4689
Email: (opens in a new window)ricki.schoen@ucd.ie