Research Group in Biography and Life-Writing at DCU
The Research Group in Biography and Life-Writing at DCU was formed in 2024. We are a collaboration between established scholars and early career researchers across the seven Schools of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. Our members are united by a curiosity about what it means to portray the reality of lived experience in various modes and artforms. Grounded in our existing strengths, our purpose is to promote research excellence in the fields of biography and life-writing at DCU and beyond.
In the area of biography, our group includes academics who write biography or biographical studies (both individual and collective) of historical, political, cultural and theological figures, and researchers working on large-scale biographical projects,
including ainm.ie.
Other researchers focus on life-writing in a wide array of manifestations, including memoir, autobiography, diaries, letters, essays, travel writing, legal testimonies, pensionapplications, blogs, and various forms of fiction.
Featured Members
Dervila Cooke researches and teaches at the School of Applied Languages and Intercultural Studies (SALIS) at Dublin City University. Her specialisms lie primarily in highly contemporary studies of creative cultural production. Her BA degree was in French and English. She has published articles on authors from the English-language creative writing sphere (Hugo Hamilton and E. Annie Proulx) along with her work focusing on French-speaking societies. Her initial research explored fictionalisation, postmemory, WW2 history, traumatic personal memory, and a problematic relationship with Frenchness and mixed Jewish identity in novelist Patrick Modiano, on whom she has published widely, including Present Pasts, her 2005 monograph on his autofictions and biofictions. In 2012, she edited a special issue of French Cultural Studies on the role of visual images and film in Modiano’s work. She is also interested in urban representations, including the contemporary flâneur and flâneuse, and in questions of ecology. Dr Cooke edited the 2016 thematic issue of the journal Comparative Literature and Culture on new work on immigration in contemporary writing in France, Québec, and Ireland. This led to two monographs on creative representations of culturally mixed autobiographical experience, both published with Palgrave Macmillan in 2024: Indigenous and Transcultural Narratives in Québec: Ways of Belonging, and Life Writing and Transcultural Youth in Contemporary France: Azouz Begag, Maryam Madjidi, and Laura Alcoba.
Dr Leeann Lane is a lecturer in the School of History and Geography DCU. She is author of three biographical studies of women active in the Irish revolutionary period who went on to navigate life in an Irish Free State that legislatively placed women in the domestic sphere of the home: Rosamond Jacob: Third Person Singular (Dublin: UCD Press, 2010), Dorothy Macardle (Dublin: UCD Press, 2019), Mary MacSwiney (Dublin: UCD Press, January 2025).
She is a member of the transnational collaborative network ‘Afterlives: uncovering life stories and contributions of rebellious women in the wake of revolution and civil war: Ireland, Finland, Germany, 1918-1980s’ funded by London Southbank University.
In October 2024 Dr Lane received a Commemorations Bursary from the Royal Irish Academy, Dublin, to curate an exhibition: ‘Afterlives: Single Women and the New State’.
Ciarán MacMurchaidh is Professor of Irish in Fiontar & Scoil na Gaeilge. His teaching and research interests relate primarily to the Irish language in the 18th century, preaching and devotional literature in Irish, Hiberno-English, and to translation studies more broadly. He is co-editor of Eighteenth-Century Ireland/ Iris an dá chultúr and joint editor, with Sparky Booker, of Studia Hibernica. His doctoral dissertation was a study of the life and Irish-language sermons of Bishop James Gallagher (c. 1684-1751), and he has written widely on many aspects of Gallagher’s life and work. Recent and forthcoming publications include essays in a range of edited volumes on Irish-language devotional literature, the fate of the Irish language in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Cavan and Sligo, as well as aspects of terminology loss and gain in Irish. A seminal publication, co-edited with Prof. James Kelly, is Irish and English: essays on the Irish linguistic and cultural frontier, 1600-1900 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2012). He is PI on the Ainm.ie project, the national database of Irish-language biographies.
Gary Murphy is Professor of Politics in the School of Law and Government at Dublin City University and a member of the Royal Irish Academy. He has published extensively on the politics of modern Ireland and his many publications include In Search of the Promised Land: The Politics of Post War Ireland (Cork, 2009); Electoral Competition in Ireland since 1987: the politics of triumph and despair (Manchester, 2016); and Haughey (Dublin, 2021), the bestselling biography of the former Taoiseach and leader of Fianna Fail, Charles J. Haughey which was the bestselling Irish non-fiction book of 2021. His work has received wide external recognition. He was Visiting Fulbright Professor of Politics at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and Naughton Distinguished Visiting Professor of Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He has advised Irish governments on issues such as the regulation of lobbying and election integrity. He is a regular presence in the Irish print and broadcast media and writes a weekly column for the Sunday Times.