Ursula Connolly

Dr. Ursula Connolly is a lecturer in the School of Law at the University of Galway, where she has taught since 2001, specialising in Tort Law and in the development of Mooting. A graduate of the University of Galway, KU Leuven, and the University of Bristol, her research explores how traditional tort principles adapt to modern challenges. She has a particular interest in liability for occupational mental injury and in how the principles of tortious liability can be applied to new and evolving technologies.

Her work is comparative and European in focus. She has contributed to major collaborative projects on Disability Discrimination and European Private Law. As a contributing Irish expert to the Common Core of European Private Law Project since 2015, she has contributed to their publications on personal injury, causation, and mass harms. Dr. Connolly’s PhD from the University of Bristol analyses the regulation of workplace bullying in Ireland. Drawing on regulatory theory, labour law and human rights instruments, it argues that workplace bullying represents a failure of effective regulation and rights’ protection.

She has delivered invited lectures on her work at several international universities including the University of Brescia, the University of Seattle, and VIT-AP University, India. She was a Visiting Scholar at the University of Berkeley in 2009, and a Visiting Researcher at the University of Otago, New Zealand (2009) and the University of Bordeaux (2025). She has served as external examiner for several Irish universities and is an occasional reviewer for the International Journal of Workplace Health.

Dr Connolly currently teaches Tort Law, and Introduction to Law. She has been centrally involved in developing Mooting within the Law School both as a curricular and extra-curricular activity. She introduced and co-delivers a compulsory  undergraduate Moot Court module and introduced and co-delivers the postgraduate Vis Moot module. Her commitment to teaching has been recognised through the award of the Presidents Award for Teaching Excellence in 2022 (for which she was nominated on several occasions), and the award of the CBPPL Deans Award for Inclusive Teaching in 2021, for which she has also been nominated on several occasions. She also won a Teaching Hero Award in 2021.