Claire Connolly is a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales, a Member of the Royal Irish Academy and an International Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Formerly a professor at Cardiff University, Claire Connolly has been held visiting positions in Irish Studies at Boston College (2002-3) and Concordia University, Montreal (Fall 2011). For 2018-19 she was Parnell Fellow in Irish Studies at Magdalene College Cambridge and in 2023-2024, she was Burns Visiting Scholar at Boston College. In autumn 2024, she was a visiting professor at the Greenhouse Center for Environmental Humanities, University of Stavanger.

She is a member of a number of editorial boards including Cambridge Studies in Romanticism and Cambridge Elements: Eighteenth-Century Connections. She also serves on the advisory board of Bloomsbury's Global Perspectives in Irish Literary Studies.

During her time in UCC, Claire Connolly has been Head of the School (2012-2015; 2017; 2020-2023) and currently serves as Director of Research for the School of English and Digital Humanities (2023-2026).

Her book, Irish Romanticism: a Literary History, is published by Cambridge University Press in December 2025.

Current research include: Irish sea crossings, colonial infrastructure and the blue humanities; Irish natural histories and plant humanities; histories of Irish women's writing from Maria Edgeworth to Sally Rooney.

2019-2023 €1,183,170 European Regional Development Fund via the Ireland Wales Programme, Ports Past and Present

2015-2018 €219,131 Irish Research Council New Horizons Award, Deep Maps: West Cork Coastal Cultures, with Prof Rob McAllen, School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences

2014 €5987 Irish Research Council New Foundations Award for a workshop on Comparative Coastal Topographies

2012 €5374 Irish Research Council New Foundations Award for an interdisciplinary symposium on the History, Theory and Culture of Roads

2007-2009 £65,000 Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) Network Grant for the Ireland Wales Research Network 

My teaching covers eighteenth- and nineteeth-century literature, Irish writing and cultural theory.

Daniella Traynor, funded by CRT-AI, 2022— 

Jessica White, funded by Research Ireland, 2023—