French staff profiles

Manu Braganca

On leave in T2, 2024/25

Contemporary France (1789-present), reception and reader-response theories, memories of WWII in France and Europe, war narratives, violence, emotions and ideology in fiction, Jean-Paul Sartre, the Hussards, Romain Gary, Anna Langfus, Claude Lanzmann, Yannick Haenel.

Michael Brophy

Chair, UCD Languages Strategy Working Group

Contemporary French poetry and poetics; the poet as critic; text and image; French-Canadian literature; contemporary migrant writing in French.

Derval Conroy

Head of French

17th-century literature, history of ideas and political thought; queenship; early modern feminisms; the history of equality; Gabrielle Suchon; women dramatists; print culture; text and image relations; festival books; early modern ceremonial. 

Mary Gallagher

Postcolonial writing in French (especially from/about the Caribbean, North, Africa, Canada, the Indian Ocean, Sub-Saharan Africa and what France called Indochine); the work of Lafcadio Hearn; the travel writings of Paul Morand; the introspective writings of authors such as Colette, Proust, Paul Valéry. I would be happy to supervise research in any of the above areas.

Ciara Gorman

Contemporary French crime fiction, female villainy, the feminist crime novel, law and/in literature, motherhood studies, the work of Fred Vargas, side interest in 17C France

Angélique Ibáñez Aristondo

Gender violence in French and Francophone history, literature, and cultures, currently focusing on Senegal and West Africa during the First World War and the interwar period.

Emer O'Beirne

Head of Research, Impact and Innovation

Twentieth- and twenty-first century prose, particularly avant-garde (nouveau roman) and experimental fiction; particular interests are the work of Marcel Proust, Nathalie Sarraute, Jean Echenoz, Jean-Philippe Toussaint. My critical engagement with literary practices is supported particularly by reflection on theories of reading, of irony, of dialogue, and of the nature of "literature" in general.

Siofra Pierse

Head of School

18th-century French historiography, literature and history of ideas: Voltaire’s historical and historiographical works; the city in 18th-century French literature; 18th-century history of ideas [currently: Diderot and narrative scepticism]; and the 18th-century female-authored French narrative [Châtelet; Tencin; Riccoboni; Graffigny; Charrière; Gouges; Staël].

Stephen Schwartz

Head of Global Engagement

Flaubert, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Cultural Theory, Individualism, Aesthetic Theory, Philosophy of Literature.

Douglas Smith

MA Modern Languages coordinator

Twentieth-century literature; literary and cultural theory; intellectual and cultural history; cultural studies; anthropology; history and theory of cinema; history and theory of photography; history and theory of twentieth-century art and architecture; museology.