Barry Monahan

I completed my BA in Drama & Theatre Studies (with French) at Trinity College Dublin, and followed this with an MA in Film Studies in University College Dublin. This led me back to Trinity where I combined my research areas of theatre and film with a PhD project that concentrated on the relationship between the Abbey Theatre and cinema from the beginning of the sound period until the 1960s. More recently my focus has been on contemporary Irish film and filmmakers, which I approach from historical, aesthetic and theoretical angles. In my monographs Ireland's Theatre on Film: Style, Stories and the National Stage on Screen (Irish Academic Press, 2009), The Films of Lenny Abrahamson: A Filmmaking of Philosophy (Bloomsbury, 2018) and Hands on Film: Actants, Aesthetics, Affects (Amsterdam University Press, 2022), I have aimed to offer innovative ways of thinking about film conceptually and stylistically. I am currently the editor of the “Film, Television and Theatre -- Year in Review" section of the online journal of Irish studies Estudios Irlandeses. I frequently contribute to regional, national and international cinema-related cultural events that have included public interviews with filmmakers, writers and performers, themed seminars, Q&A sessions, and panel discussions in a variety of institutions. These include (or have included) the Schull Fastnet International Film Festival, the Cork International Film Festival, the Cork Indie Film Festival, the Irish Film Institute, the Queen's Film Theatre (Belfast) the Rome Ireland Film Festival, and the Puerto Vallarta International Film Festival in Mexico. Between 2015 and 2024, I worked with Crónán Ó Doibhlin (Boole Library, UCC) on the acquisition of the Richard Harris personal collection, which is now housed in the university library. I am currently the Chair of the Irish Screen Studies Board, and a member of the ISS Journal Editorial Board. The first issue of that online, peer-reviewed publication will appear in May, 2026.

Since the completion of my PhD research into a specific period in the history of Irish cinema (1930-1960), and specifically into the relationship between Irish theatre and film, I have continued to expand and explore thematic strands from this field – around aesthetics, theoretical and textual analysis – into the contemporary context. My areas of interest range widely across approaches to post-1990s Irish visual culture (informed by a variety of paradigms from gender, genre, and star studies, to poststructural, postnational, and postmodern frameworks), and I am interested in various aesthetic features of visual media including performance studies and technical developments. I am also interested in linguistics and psycholinguistics, and have published work on the theoretical intersection of film and linguistics.