Dr. Deirdre Byrnes is Head of German and Senior Lecturer at University of Galway. She is a graduate of University College Cork, where she obtained a BA in German and French (First Class Honours), a Higher Diploma in Education, and an MPhil (First Class Honours). She was awarded her PhD from University College Dublin. Deirdre was the recipient of numerous awards, including a DAAD undergraduate scholarship which enabled her to study at the University of Heidelberg, and the Boyle Postgraduate Scholarship in German from University College Cork. She conducted much of the research for her MPhil at the University of Konstanz. As a doctoral student, she was the recipient of a DAAD postgraduate research scholarship and studied at the University of Potsdam and the Freie Universität Berlin. She was also awarded a postgraduate research scholarship from the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Deirdre's research interests include GDR literature, contemporary women writers in German-language literature, in particular Monika Maron and Katja Petrowskaja, and the reception of Seán O’Casey in the GDR. She is also interested in generational memory transmission, contested memories and forms of memorialisation in post-unification Berlin. More recently, she has presented on podcasting in the language classroom. She has published extensively on Monika Maron, including a monograph Rereading Monika Maron: Text, Counter-Text and Context (Peter Lang, 2011). She is co-editor, together with Jean Conacher and Gisela Holfter, of German Reunification and the Legacy of GDR Literature and Culture (Brill, 2018) and of Perceptions and Perspectives: Exploring Connections between Ireland and the GDR (Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2019). Together with Dr. Tina-Karen Pusse, Professor Hans-Walter Schmidt-Hannisa and Dr. Michaela Schrage-Früh, she co-edited Der Deutsche Wald: Zur Literatur- und Kulturgeschichte eines Mythos (Königshausen & Neumann, 2024).

Deirdre is a member of the Women and Ageing Research Network and the Centre for Irish-German Studies, which is based at the University of Limerick. She was a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Womens Writing, School of Advanced Study, University of London in the Autumn of 2018.

Deirdre is course director of Legal German at University of Galway and is responsible for the coordination, curriculum design and delivery of the Legal German module on the Civil Law, Law and Business, Law and Human Rights, and Law, Criminology and Criminal Justice programmes. She teaches the seminar "Law in Literature" to Second Year Arts students and "Memory in Contemporary German Writing" to Final Year Arts students (to whom she has also taught "The Novella in German Literature" in recent years). She also contributes to the Final Year Global Languages module "Memory, Memorialisation and the Representation of Conflict". Deirdre teaches the module "Resisting through Culture: Conflicts in Europe and Beyond" to students of the MA in International Contemporary Literatures and Media.