Current PhD Research Students

Lecturer/Researcher

Marie Louise O Donnell is a graduate of Nottingham University, Maynooth, UCD and The Guild Hall London. She became Head of Drama at Carysfort Teacher Training College, trained in Radio production, presentation and direction with the BBC in London and made and presented programmes for BBC Radio 4 for years. She became a member of staff in DCU for 24 years as a lecturer in The School of Communications. She initiated, developed and championed a professional Arts and Theatre programme across the young DCU University campus all culminating in the imagining, building and launch of The Helix in 2002.  She was appointed to the Board of the National Concert Hall for 2 terms.

Marie Louise has lectured extensively in Ireland, Europe and the USA in Education, Irish Drama, Irish Culture and Language. For 10 years, she worked weekly as a colour radio writer and reporter on RTE Today with Pat Kenny and Today with Sean O’Rourke shows. In May 2011, she was appointed to the Senate by the then Taoiseach Enda Kenny and re-appointed in 2016. In 2019 she published her first book Irish Working Lives. She was appointed the Honorary Consul for Latvia in 2021. 

In 2023 She was awarded a PhD fellowship by TU Dublin to study the work of the writer John McGahern. As part of her research project, she has recorded three of McGahern’s short stories as radio plays in the actual locations in which they were set in Leitrim and Roscommon and using local actors.