NCFIS External Board Members
Sarah Balen is the current President of the Association of Franco-Irish Studies (AFIS)  Sarah Balen is the current President of the Association of Franco-Irish Studies (AFIS) and a lecturer of Urban, American, and Contemporary Anglophone and Irish Literature at the Institute of Art, Design and Technology (IADT), Dublin. She was awarded a research fellowship at the National Centre for Franco-Irish Studies, TU Dublin, where she completed a doctoral thesis which analysed interconnections between the works of several city poets including Charles Baudelaire, Fernando Pessoa, T.S. Eliot and contemporary Irish poet Peter Sirr. A particular focus was on the role of woman or other within the city space. She has published a number of chapters on these and other poets, including Paula Meehan, and has co-edited Sounding the Margins: Literary Examples from France and Ireland (Peter Lang Oxford, 2022) with Eamon Maher. 
Michael Cronin is 1776 Professor of French and Director of the Centre for Literary and Cultural Translation in Trinity College Dublin 

Michael Cronin is 1776 Professor of French and Director of the Centre for Literary and Cultural Translation in Trinity College Dublin. Among his published titles are Translating Ireland: Translation, Languages and Identity (1996); Across the Lines: Travel, Language, Translation (2000); Translation and Globalization (2003); Time Tracks: Scenes from the Irish Everyday; Irish in the New Century/An Ghaeilge san Aois Nua (2005); Translation and Identity (2006); The Barrytown Trilogy (2007); Translation goes to the Movies (2009); Translation in the Digital Age (2013); Eco-Translation: Translation and Ecology in the Age of the Anthropocene (2017), Irish and Ecology: An Ghaeilge agus an Éiceolaíocht (2019) and Eco-Travel: Journeying in the Age of the Anthropocene to be published by Cambridge University Press in 2022. He is a Member of the Royal Irish Academy, the Academia Europaea, an Officier in the Ordre des Palmes Académiques and a Fellow of Trinity College Dublin.

 
Professor Derek Hand is the Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Dublin City University 

Professor Derek Hand is the Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Dublin City University. The Liffey Press published his book John Banville: Exploring Fictions in 2002. He edited a special edition of the Irish University Review on John Banville in 2006. His A History of the Irish Novel: 1665 to the present was published by Cambridge University Press in 2011. He is also the co-editor of a collection of essays on John McGahern entitled, Essays on John McGahern: Assessing a Literary Legacy published by Cork University Press in 2019. He is currently working on a book for the Routledge Press, The Celtic Tiger Novel: Reading Literature, Culture and Society and co-editing a volume Companion to the Contemporary Irish Novel (1980-2020).

 
Catherine Maignant is professor of Irish studies at the university of Lille (France) 

Catherine Maignant is professor of Irish studies at the university of Lille (France) where she was the head of a research group in Irish studies for over 20 years. She was president of the French Association of Irish studies (SOFEIR) and of the European Federation of Associations and Centres of Irish Studies (EFACIS) for a number of years. After writing a PhD on early medieval Irish Christianity, she now specializes in contemporary Irish religious history. Her research interests include the New Religious Movements, the response of the Catholic Church to secularization, interreligious dialogue, Celtic Christianity and the religious aspects of globalization. She has widely published in all these areas.

 
Grace Neville is emeritus professor of French at UCC where she was also Vice-President for Teaching and Learning 

Grace Neville is a graduate of University College Cork (French and Irish), Caen (maîtrise, French Government Scholarship holder) and Lille (DEA and doctorate). She is emeritus professor of French at UCC where she was also Vice-President for Teaching and Learning. Since retiring from UCC in 2012, she has been a member of numerous committees at the Ministère de l’Enseignement Supérieur, de la Recherche et de l’Innovation, the Sorbonne, the HCERES, the CRI (Paris) and the European Commission, as well as at the universities of Rennes, Aix-Marseille and Cergy-Pontoise. She is a member of the Advisory Board of the European University, EUTOPIA. Her ongoing research focuses especially on Franco-Irish links from the medieval to the modern period. She is Vice-President of the Alliance Francaise de Cork, Chair of AMOPA Irlande and Vice-President of the Irish board of the Légion d’honneur. She is a Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur and a Chevalier des Palmes Académiques.

Eugene O’Brien is Senior lecturer, and Head of the Department of English Language and Literature in Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick 

Eugene O’Brien is Senior lecturer, and Head of the Department of English Language and Literature in Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, Ireland, and is also the director of the Mary Immaculate Institute for Irish Studies. He is the editor for the Oxford University Press Online Bibliography project in literary theory (Oxford Online Bibliographies: Literary and Cultural Theory), and of the Routledge Studies in Irish Literature series (Routledge Studies in Irish Literature). His latest books include Contemporary Irish Poetry and the Climate Crisis, co-edited with Andrew J. Auge (Routledge, 2021) and Reimagining Irish Studies for the Twenty-First Century, co-edited with Eamon Maher (Peter Lang, 2021). He is currently working on a monograph on Paul Howard (Routledge 2022); a monograph on Micheal O’Siadhail (Routledge) and A Companion to 21st century Irish Writing, with Anne Fogarty (Routledge).

Ben Keatinge, AFIS Board member Ben Keatinge is a poet and critic based in Dublin. He has co-edited France and Ireland in the Public Imagination with Mary Pierse (Peter Lang, 2014), Other Edens: The Life and Work of Brian Coffey with Aengus Woods (Irish Academic Press, 2010), and has edited Making Integral: Critical Essays on Richard Murphy (Cork UP, 2019). His essays on Franco-Irish themes have been published in the Reimagining Ireland series with contributions on Richard Murphy, Harry Clifton and Denis Devlin. He won the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award in 2022 for his manuscript, The Wireless Station and he has published his poems in The Irish Times, Reading Ireland, The Dalhousie Review, Archipelago and in anthologies from Dedalus Press, UCD Press and Lapwing.

Don O'Neill - External board member of the NCFIS at TU Dublin

Don O’Neill is a Senior Lecturer in French in the Department of Arts at South East Technological University, Waterford. He graduated with a BA in French and Spanish with Portuguese and a Masters degree in French from University College, Cork, a Diplôme d’études supérieures spécialisées (DESS) in International Business from the University of Perpignan, and a doctorate in Education from the University of Bath.

He has initiated and managed numerous Erasmus+, Erasmus Mundus and Tempus projects with French universities including Grenoble, La Rochelle, Lille, Montpellier and Perpignan. He is a member of the France-Ireland Culinary Arts, Hospitality and Tourism network (FICAHT), and has forged close links with leading culinary and hospitality schools including Institute Paul Bocuse, Lyon, and the Ecole Ferrandi, Paris.

Currently he supervises doctoral research around internationalisation in higher education. In 2023 he was awarded an Irish Research Council/French Embassy Ulysses grant to undertake research around ‘internationalisation at home’ with colleagues in the area of innovative pedagogy at La Rochelle Université.

 

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