English

Contact Details

Title	Lecturer
Address	English University College Cork Cork Ireland
Telephone:	+353-21-490-3000
Email:	ei.ccu@riohcllaG.C

Biography:

Clíona Ó Gallchoir was appointed as a lecturer in the School of English in UCC in 1999, having previously lectured in University College Dublin.  She graduated from UCD with a BA in English and German in 1992, having spent a year as a DAAD scholar at the University of Tuebingen, and subsequently received an MA in Anglo-Irish Literature, also from UCD.  She completed a PhD at Trinity College Cambridge in 1998, where she was the recipient of the Robert Gardiner Scholarship.

Her research interests include Irish writing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with a particular focus on women's writing. In 2005 she published Maria Edgeworth: Women, Enlighenment and Nation (UCD Press), which has been described as "a welcome and timely reappraisal of a complex and neglected author's contribution to Irish literature. Informed by an awareness of the particularly precarious position of the Irish woman writer, Gallchoir rereads Edgeworth's construction of Irishness within the discourses of Enlightenment and gender ... [it] should resurrect wide academic interest in a strain of complex and undervalued Irish women's fiction." (Irish Studies Review 15 (1) 2007).  She continues to research in this field, and has published several articles on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction and women's writing.  She also researches and teaches in the area of children's literature, an interest arising in part from a two-year leave of absence (2007-2009), when she worked as a volunteer teacher trainer with VSO in Eritrea, NE Africa.  In 2011, she received a Canadian government grant to pursue research on Irish-Canadian children's fiction, and an essay on this topic is forthcoming in 2013.