I took up my current role as Head of the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the University of Galway in July 2024. Prior to that, I served as Head of the Department of French, at University College Cork from 2018 to 2020 and was Head of the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, again at UCC, from 2019 to 2022.

My journey here, if there is one, might have started when I was a child listening to stories of the Irish War of Independence from my Grandmother and stories of emigration from my Dad. I had a love of history from them and a fascination with contemporary French short stories (Camus, Sartre, Ionesco) from schooland went on to UCC where I obtained a BA degree in History and French and later, after time in France and as a teacher in Mayfield Community School,went on to complete an MA in French.

I pursued further studies at the Université de Lille , where I successfully completed a Diplôme dÉtudes Approfondies en analyses des phénomènes interculturels (Masters in Advanced Studies in Intercultural Phenomena). In 2001, I completed myPhD in French at the University of London where I worked under the supervision of Michael Sheringham at Royal Holloway, University of London. Since then the primary focus of my research has beenon modern and contemporary cultural production in the French-speaking world, in particular Algeria.

My first monograph, Pierre Michon: The Afterlife of Names (2007), examines the place of canonical writers and avant-garde French thinkers in the work of the contemporary French writer Pierre Michon. I have edited or co-edited nine edited volumes or journal issues, most recently, with Carlos Garrido Castellano, a thematic issue of Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies , titled `The Afterlives of Anticolonial Aesthetics, (2022). Others include Travels: Self and Other from the Ancient World to Contemporary Society (with Noreen Humble and Silvia Ross) and Postcolonial Poetics: Genre and Form (with Jane Hiddleston).

I was General Editor of the Irish Journal of French Studies from 2011 to 2014 and am a member of the Editorial Boards of Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, Modern Languages Open, Francophone Postcolonial Studies book series and the Bulletin of Francophone Postcolonial Studies. I was awarded a Government of Ireland Senior Research Fellowship for the project `Algeria: Nation and Transnationalism 1988-2010' by the Irish Research Council for Humanities and Social Sciences (now the Irish Research Council ). This has led to a number of publications, including Algeria: Nation, Culture and Transnationalism 1988-2015 (Liverpool University Press, 2017) and a special issue of Studies in Travel Writing titled `Travel, colonialism and encounters with the Maghreb: Algeria 21: 3 (2017)and, with Megan MacDonald, a special issue of Contemporary French and Francophone Studies , titled `The Contemporary Roman Maghrébin : Aesthetics, Politics, Production, 2000-2015 20: 2 (2016).

I was a member of the Society for French Studies Executive and Chair of the R. Gapper Book Prize Jury from 2019-2022. I am also a member of the Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies where I served as PRO from 2004 to 2007. I served on the Executive Committee of Association des Études Françaises et Francophone dIrlande (ADEFFI) from 2003 to 2006 and from 2011 to 2014. I am a Director of the Centre for Studies in Memory and Literature (University of Iceland). Between March of 2009 and 2014 I served as a member of the UNESCO Consultative Group and Sponsoring Committee for the project, Rabindranath Tagore, Pablo Neruda and Aimé Césaire: towards a reconciled universalism. At the University of Galway I teach on the relationship between France and Algeria as mediated by the cultural representations of the Algerian War of Independence.

I have taught on Francophone diasporas, travel writing and the Mediterranean, as well as contemporary autobiographical forms. I offer supervision to postgraduate students wishing to work on issues of identity regarding contemporary cultural production in French or Francophone postcolonial studies.

The primary focus of my research is on poetic form, its construction and its destabilization, mainly within colonial contexts. By form I mean a type or category of literary work or genre. My workconcentrates on a number of particular genres - the novel, the autobiography, the biography, the essay - and on how elements of each can be incorporated into a single text in a way that can unsettle conventional and ideological commonplaces about genre. I examine modern and contemporary prose written in France and in former French colonies. I have published in leading peer-reviewed international journals, includingParagraph ,French Forum ,Romance Studies ,Francophone Postcolonial Studies ,Expressions Maghrébines . I am currently, if slowly, working on a monograph titled Algerian Allegories. Aesthetics, Anticolonialism and the Future of Past Revolutions for the University of Virginia Press). Im looking forward to two forthcoming Public - No restrictionations, the first, with Carlos Garrido Castellano is the edited volumeThe Afterlives of Anticolonial Aesthetics , as part of Routledge Special Issues as Books (SPIBs) (London: Routledge, 2025) and the second, with Gunnþórunn Guðmundsdóttir,is aspecial issue of Memory Studies Review , titled `Slow Memory: The Transformative Promptings of Literature in Post-conflict Societies (2026). My earlier work focused on genre in the work of the contemporary French writer Pierre Michon and the main focus of my research in this area was the delineation ofthe ways in which Michon incorporates ideas of genre developed by the French avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s. The books reception in France has been positive and resulted in an invitation to present at the international colloquium on Pierre Michon held in Cérisy in 2009. The interdisciplinary nature of my research, and its contribution to literary theory, is reflected in the Public - No restrictionation of a co-edited collectionFormless: Ways in an out of Form (with my colleague Paul Hegarty). My work on genre within colonial contextshas led toPostcolonial Poetics: Form and Genre, a collection of essays co-edited with Jane Hiddleston andpublished by Liverpool University Press in 2011. Within the context of colonial studies my article published inFrench Forum (2004) on genre and on pragmatic approaches to theories of genre led to two commissioned pieces for Public - No restrictionations that will serve as key reference points for students of postcolonial studies namely,A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures: Continental Europe and its Empires (2008) andPostcolonial Thought in the Francophone World (2009).In addition my work has appeared in international journals devoted to colonialism and poetics. My article, Images of Algeria, which appeared in a special issue of Expressions Maghrébines led to an invitation to address a conference on cinematic forms of cultural memory held in Sétif, Algeria. Similarly, my article on Edouard Glissants poetics of opacity was accepted for a special issue ofRomance Studies entitled `The Literary Territories of Postcolonialism and led to an invitation to present at the Sorbonne on the topic of politics and postcolonialism in 2008. Extending the analysis of colonial critique, I have recently co-edited a collection of essays onTravel Writing in the Mediteranean (Oxford, Legenda, 2011) with Noreen Humble and Silvia Ross. I have been asked to act as referee for journals suchModern and Contemporary France, French Studies andStudies in Travel Writing .

I hugely enjoy teaching and I try to be good at what I do. I bring my research into the classroom and my teaching style is informed by experience (I learned my craft teaching in a community school) and by academic qualifications: Higher Diploma in Education (1987, NUI) and the Postgraduate Certificate in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (2018, UCC). I have maintained a keen interest in new developments and approaches. My approach has also been informed by on-going critical reflection on teaching and research and by listening to feedback from my students. I currently offer a module on the Ends of Empire focusing on cultural representations of the memory of the Algerian War of Independence.