Full Professor
UCD School of English, Drama and Film
Gerardine Meaney is Full Professor of Cultural Theory and Director of the UCD Centre for Cultural Analytics in the School of English, Drama and Film. An expert on the application of new digital methodologies to humanities research, she is an international leader on showing how this area can break down barriers of learning.
She has championed the critical study of Irish women’s writing throughout her career and established the first course in women’s writing in English at UCD. Her work has examined the dynamics of cultural change, gender, nationality and ethnicity, and brought attention to the voices of women. Her current research interests are in gender, migration and national identities in literature and culture and the application of new digital methodologies to humanities research.
It is really important that women do not settle for a mere place in academia, no matter how elevated that place. Academia needs to become a different place, answer our demand for change, ask new research questions, work in new ways, open up to all of society. Real success has to be on your own terms.
Gerardine is the Principal Investigator of a European Research Council funded project on VICTEUR: European Migrants in the British Imagination: Victorian and Neo-Victorian Culture. The project was awarded a prestigious European Research Council Advanced Grant of €2.5 million for a study focused on migration and culture. She is one of two Irish women to be awarded this Grant, the first two women in Ireland to gain such an award.
Victorian Britain was much more diverse than we assume today. It was the target destination for large numbers of migrants from across Europe fleeing war, political turmoil and economic deprivation. The study will use big data to address a key unanswered societal question – how does migration impact on the cultural identity of both migrant and host communities in the historical long-term? It will combine data analytics and literary criticism to investigate representations of migrants and by migrants in Victorian fiction. The primary case studies will be Irish, Italian and Eastern European Jewish migrants. The study will also analyse continuities and changes in the representation of migration in neo-Victorian global transmedia in the 21st century.
Gerardine is a Member of the Royal Irish Academy. In 2021-22 she was a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Advance Studies, University of Edinburgh.