Rebecca Braun joined the University ofGalway in 2021 to take up the position of Executive Dean of the College of Arts, Social Sciences & Celtic Studies. Before then, she was Professor of Modern Languages & Creative Futures at Lancaster University in the UK, where she was also Co-Director of the Institute for Social Futures from 2017-2020. She has held further lectureships and research fellowships at the Universities of Liverpool, Manchester and Oxford in the UK and at the Freie Universität Berlin. She grew up in West Cork and Tipperary and likes nothing better than a good long run outdoors.

Rebecca's work explores how literary texts can drive new ways of thinking about the future, both as objects of analysis (traditional literary criticism) and as a co-creative process (practice-focused workshops using creative writing techniques). This futures work builds on a deep understanding of the power of people and stories, which she has traced in numerous books on authorship, world literature, transnationalism, and cultural value. Most recently, these include Authors and the World: Literary Authorship in Modern Germany (Bloomsbury 2022 - paperback version 2024), World Authorship, co-edited with Tobias Boes and Emily Spiers (Oxford: OUP, 2020) and Transnational German Studies, co-edited with Benedict Schofield (Liverpool: LUP, 2020). In her current projects and speaking engagements, Rebecca highlights the power of creative practice and the importance of linguistic and cultural difference to contemporary futures thinking as undertaken by a variety of governmental, industry and third sector stakeholders.

Rebecca welcomes all enquiries for PhD supervision broadly in the areas of literary / creative futures, (world) authorship, the sociological contexts in which literature is created and sustained, and 20th and 21st-century German-language literature.