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 at UCC from 2019 to 2022.

I am President of the Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies and General Editor of the Francophone Postcolonial Studies book series with Liverpool University Press.

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. My love of history and the wider world came from them. At school I had a fascination with contemporary French short stories (Camus, Sartre, Ionesco) taught by Michael O'Donnell and went on to UCC to study French and History.

Later, after time in France, and as a teacher in Mayfield Community School, I went on to complete an MA in French. I pursued further studies at the Université de Lille, where I successfully completed a Diplôme d'Études Approfondies en analyses des phénomènes interculturels (Masters in Advanced Studies in Intercultural Phenomena). In 2001, I completed my PhD 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 been on 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, The Afterlives of Anticolonial Aesthetics, published by Routledge in 2025. 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, the 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 Research Ireland). This led to a number of publications, including Algeria: Nation, Culture and Transnationalism 1988–2015 (Liverpool University Press, 2017), 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 the Association des Études Françaises et Francophone d'Irlande (ADEFFI) from 2003 to 2006 and from 2011 to 2014. I am a Director of the Centre for Studies in Memory and Literature at the University of Iceland.

Between March 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 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 and postcolonial contexts. By form I mean a type or category of literary work or genre. My work concentrates on a number of particular genres — the novel, autobiography, biography and essay — and on how elements of each can be incorporated into a single text in ways that can unsettle conventional and ideological commonplaces about genre.

I examine modern and contemporary prose written in France and in former French colonies, with a particular emphasis on Algeria. My research is concerned with the relationship between literary form, cultural production and political history, and with the ways in which literary and cultural forms engage with colonialism, anticolonialism and their afterlives.

I am currently working on a monograph, Algerian Allegories: Aesthetics, Anticolonialism and the Future of Past Revolutions, for the University of Virginia Press. The project focuses on contemporary Algerian cultural production and examines the relationship between aesthetics, anticolonialism, memory and the continuing significance of past revolutionary imaginaries.

With Carlos Garrido Castellano, I co-edited The Afterlives of Anticolonial Aesthetics, published as part of the Routledge Special Issues as Books (SPIBs) in 2025. In late 2026 I look forward to the publication of a special issue of Memory Studies Review, titled Slow Memory: Literary Configurations in Post-Conflict Society, which I co-edited with Prof. Gunnþórunn Guðmundsdóttir (University of Iceland).

I hugely enjoy teaching. 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.