Pól Ó Dochartaigh

Pól Ó Dochartaigh is the Established Professor of European History and former Deputy President and Registrar (2014-24) of the University of Galway. His research stretches across history, literature and politics in a German-Jewish-Irish triangle. He is the author of five books and 40+ articles and reports, and the editor or co-editor of seven collections of essays. Among his monographs are Germany since 1945 (Basingstoke 2003), Julius Pokorny, 1887-1970: Germans, Celts and Nationalism (Dublin 2004) and Germans and Jews since the Holocaust (Basingstoke 2015).

He hails from Belfast, where he was educated at St. Mary's Christian Brothers' Grammar School. Having abandoned a degree in Pure Maths and Computer Science at Queen's University Belfast and subsequently spending a year working in BMW in Munich, three years studying in Cardiff and another at the Christian-Albrechts-Universität in Kiel, he graduated in German from University College Cardiff in 1987, the single honours degree consisting one-third each of German language, literature and contemporary history. After two years teaching English at the Wilhelm-Pieck-Universität Rostock in the GDR he undertook a PhD in German cultural history at Nottingham University under the supervision of Prof. Hamish Reid, graduating in 1995 with a thesis on The Portrayal of Jews in GDR Prose Fiction, which formed the basis of a book published by Rodopi in Amsterdam in 1997. 

Committed to life-long learning, he took a Postgraduate Certificate in University Teaching at the University of Ulster in 1996-97. From 1995 he re-engaged with the Irish language, taking an A Level in 1999 and, after five years of part-time study, he graduated BA in Irish Language and Literature with first-class honours at Ulster in 2004. In 2019 he was conferred with a DLitt for his work in German and German History by the University of Nottingham. In 2025, after three years' part-time study by distance learning, he was conferred with a Master's in Scottish History (MLitt with Distinction) by the University of Dundee.

He lectured German at Maynooth in 1990-91 and, after a brief sojourn in Derby following his PhD scholarship took up a position as Lecturer in German at Ulster in 1994. In 2001 he was promoted to Senior Lecturer and in 2005 to Professor of German. From 2005-8 he was founding Director of the Humanities Research Institute at Ulster and from 2008-14 Dean of the Faculty of Arts. He also led a successful bid to secure a Confucius Institute for Northern Ireland and was its Dean 2011-14.

In spring 2014 he was appointed to a ten-year term as Deputy President and Registrar at what was then the National University of Ireland, Galway (NUI Galway). As Chief Academic Officer of the University his responsibilities included the development and implementation of new policies and strategies on Teaching and Learning, Academic Promotions, Sustainability and the Irish Language, and he led the project to rename the institution as University of Galway, which was completed in Feb 2024. He also chaired the Board of the Central Applications Office (CAO) 2018-22.

Pól directed a Hefce-funded project (Stg144k) on Assessment in Modern Languages at Ulster (1998-2001), was a Founding Member of the International Feuchtwanger Society for the study of German-Jewish exile (University of Southern California, Los Angeles, 2001) and was a visiting professor at the University of Vienna's Institut für Sprachwissenschaft in 2003. He chaired the Royal Irish Academy's Committee for Modern Language, Literary and Cultural Studies (2004-9), and was elected Vice-President (2008-11) and then President (2011-14) of the Association for German Studies in Great Britain and Ireland.

He was elected a Member of the Royal Irish Academy in 2010, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2009 and he has been a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy in the UK since 2000. He served on the German Panel for the UK's Research Assessment Exercise (RAE 2008) and on the Modern Languages and Linguistics Panel for the Research Excellence Framework (REF 2014). In 2013 he was awarded £408k as PI by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) for a three-year project on Representations of Jews in Irish Literature. Between 2016 and 2019 the exhibition from the project opened in seven locations in all four of Ireland's provinces as well as Columbia University in New York, the Irish Writers Festival in Los Gatos, California, Georgetown University in Washington, DC, the Mickve Israel Synagogue in Savannah, Georgia, and the Jewish Public Library in Montréal.

He has given invited talks at, inter alia, the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, the University of Notre Dame, Cambridge University, Oxford University, Trinity College Dublin, Columbia University, NY, the Moses-Mendelssohn Zentrum at Potsdam University, Georgetown University, DC, Ljubljana University, Freiburg University, University of Florida at Gainesville, and Edinburgh University. In January 2018 he had the great honour of introducing and interviewing Holocaust survivor Tomi Reichental at a Holocaust Memorial Day event at Ulster University in Belfast.

Research interests include Modern German History and Literature; German-Jewish History and Literature; Anti-Semitism; Jews in Ireland; National Identities; Scottish History; Onomastics. He has supervised several PhD and postdoctoral researchers on German Jewish, Scottish Jewish, Irish Jewish and minority language themes.

His teaching interests are primarily in twentieth-century German and German-Jewish history, antisemitism and modern Scotland. His former role as Deputy President normally involved no teaching, but in autumn 2020 during Covid he taught a module on GDR Literature, looking at texts relating to three groups that were far from the centre of power in the GDR: Jews, young people and women.

He is currently on a research sabbatical and will return to teaching in autumn 2026.