Clíona Ó Gallchoir

Clíona Ó Gallchoir joined the School of English and Digital Humanities (then the Department of English) in 1999. 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 Tübingen, 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.

My research interests include women's writing and constructions of gender and sexuality in Irish writing in the long eighteenth-century, the figure of the child in eighteenth-century Ireland, and children's literature.

I am the co-editor, with Heather Ingman, of A History of Modern Irish Women's Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2018), and I have contributed essays on eighteenth-century literature to Ireland and Masculinities in History, edited by Rebecca Barr, Sean Brady and Jane McGaughey, (Palgrave, 2019); The Golden Thread: Irish Women Playwrights, 1716-2016, edited by David Clare, Fiona McDonagh and Justine Nakase (Liverpool U P, 2021); and Irish Literature in Transition, 1700-1780, edited by Moyra Haslett (Cambridge University Press, 2020). I am an expert on the work of Maria Edgeworth, who is the subject of my monograph, Maria Edgeworth: Women, Enlightenment and Nation (2005). In this book I place Edgeworth's writing in the context of contemporary theories of women's writing, nationality and social change. My new critical introduction to Edgeworth was published in 2021 in the Key Irish Women Writers series from Edward Everett Root. An essay on the Edgeworth children, entitled "Growing Up as a Girl in Edgeworthstown House, c.1782-1807: The Experiences of Elizabeth and Charlotte Edgeworth" is forthcoming in Women's Writing in 2026.

I also research and teach in the area of children's literature, an interest arising in part from a two-year leave of absence (2007-2009), when I worked as a volunteer teacher trainer with VSO in Eritrea, NE Africa. I have published on Irish-Canadian children's authors and on contemporary Irish children's literature, and my chapter on "The Early Novel for Children" in the Cambridge History of Children's Literature in English is fortcoming from Cambridge University Press in 2026.

I teach across the range of undergraduate courses, contributing to modules EN1011 Literature in Time; EN2023 Eighteenth-Century Literature; EN3072 Romantic Literature, and I offer seminars on topics including Children's Literature and Romantic-Period Women's Writing. At MA level I contribute to the modules EN6027 Romanticism and Modernity; EN6028 Theories of Modernity and EN6048 Modernity and Irish Writing.

PhD Supervisions (Completed)

Maria Butler, "Activism and the Authorial Persona: Narratives of Addiction, Depression and Abortion in the Writings of Marian Keyes" (Primary supervisor, 2024)
Tetsuko Nakamura, "Fiction and travel writing in Ireland, 1750-1840" (Co-supervisor, 2024)
Thomas Oliver Dennehy, "Montstrous Mothers and Founding Fathers: Kristevan Maternality in Cynthia Voigt's Tillerman Cycle" (Co-supervisor, 2023)
Áilín Quinlan, "Mad mums, bad dads and heroines with "street cred”: an analysis of multiple perspectives on the appeal of Jacqueline Wilson's dark realism" (Primary supervisor, 2023)
Éadaoin Regan, "A Method to the Madness? Representations of Female Psychological Disorder in Irish Women’s Fiction 1878-1914" (Primary Supervisor, 2023)
Mairéad Mooney, "Recovering Children’s Reading: The “Queer Treasures” of the Children’s Collection in Cork Public Library, 1922-1939" (Primary supervisor, 2019)