Prof. Clíona Ní Ríordáin
Clíona Ní Ríordáin is a critic and translator. She holds a doctorate from the University of Lyon Lumière, post-graduate degrees from the Sorbonne, the Sorbonne Nouvelle and University College Cork, and an undergraduate degree from Mary Immaculate College, Limerick. Before joining Notre Dame, she taught Irish literature and translation studies at the Sorbonne Nouvelle from 2003-2023.
She is the editor of four anthologies of Irish poetry, and two collections of essays, Speaking Like a Spanish Cow (Ibidem 2019) and The Poets and Poetry of Munster (Ibidem 2023). She co-authored Irlande: histoire, société, culture, with Maurice Goldring (La Découverte, 2012). Her monograph, English Language Poets in University College Cork (Palgrave 2020), was the first to explore the work of a generation of Irish poets who came to maturity after Donogh O’Malley’s 1967 education act. Yell, Sam, If You Still Can (Lilliput 2022), her translation of Maylis Besserie’s first novel was a Financial Times book of the year in 2022. Her most recent publication is a personal anthology of the poems of Gerry Murphy, Plus loin encore (Circe, 2023), co-edited and co-translated with Paul Bensimon.
She is an Irish government appointee to the strategy committee of the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris. Her research interests include contemporary Irish literature, especially poetry, in Irish and English, the sociology of literature, translation studies, and sociolinguistics.
Prof. Peter McQuillan
Peter McQuillan, Associate Professor of Irish Language and Literature, holds a B.A. and M.A. from University College, Dublin, and a Ph.D. in Celtic languages and literatures from Harvard University. Before coming to Notre Dame, he held the Sir John Rhys Studentship in Celtic Studies at Jesus College, Oxford University, and taught Irish at the University of Regensburg in Germany and at Harvard.
He has published articles in the Journal of Celtic Linguistics and Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, and is currently preparing material for publication in Ériu and Éigse. He is the author of Modality and the Subjunctive Mood in Irish (2002) and Native and Natural: Aspects of the Concepts of Right and Freedom in Irish (2004), an analysis of the transformation of concepts of rights and freedom as expressed in the Irish language.
Professor McQuillan has twice served as chair of the Department of Irish Language and Literature. He is curently the director of undergraduate studies in the Department of Irish Language Literature.
In February 2019, he delivered the annual Breandán Ó Buachalla Memorial Lecture, a signature event in the Keough-Naughton Institute’s academic year. His theme: “Remarks on the History of Social and Political Concepts in Irish.”
Prof. Rory Rapple
Rory Rapple is Associate Professor of History with research interests that include political thinking in Early Modern Britain and Ireland; Britain, Ireland and the Atlantic World; violence in Early-Modern Europe; military culture in Early Modern Europe; and aspects of political and social culture in Ireland during the twentieth century.
He is currently writing a book on the life and mental world of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, the pioneer of English transatlantic exploration and settlement who played a significant role in Irish history. The book will place particular emphasis on his considerable reputation among contemporaries as the champion of a particularly high view of monarchical power.
He is also researching and writing on the methods used in the administration of the Crown Army in Tudor and Early Stuart Ireland from the eve of the Nine Years’ War to the unfolding of Strafford’s plans for a new army. This is part of a wider survey of the character of the Tudor and Stuart administration in Ireland. A third book project is the dynamic of the conflict often called the “Nine Years’ War” which convulsed both English and Irish politics in the last decade of Elizabeth I’s reign.
Professor Rapple’s publications include: Martial Power and Elizabethan Political Culture: military men in England and Ireland, 1558-1594 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); ‘Brinkmanship and bad luck: Ireland, the Nine Years’ War and the Succession’ in Doubtful and Dangerous:The Question of succession in late Elizabethan England, eds S. Doran and P. Kewes (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), 236-256; and Shakespeare, the Irish, and Military Culture’ an 8,500 word chapter in The Age of Shakespeare, ed. R. Malcolm Smuts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).