Dr Áine McGillicuddy (B.A., M.A., Ph.D) is Assistant Professor in the School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies (SALIS) where she lectures in German Studies and Children's & YA Literature Studies.  She is co-editor of Politics and Ideology in Children's Literature and has authored a monograph, articles and book chapters on topics ranging from Alsatian Expressionist writer René Schickele (1883-1940), child exiles from the Nazi era to picturebooks engaging with migration in contemporary contexts.

She was a long-standing executive committee member of the Irish Society for the Study of Children's Literature (ISSCL) and Vice-President / President of the Irish branch of the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY) as well as a board member of the Irish Humanities Alliance from December 2017-2020. She is a member of DCU's Centre for Translation and Textual Studies (CTTS) and was the CTTS Director from January 2017-August 2020. Since 2022 she is the Irish representative on the committee for Women in German Studies (UK and Ireland).

She is lead PI on the DCU research team for the EU co-funded Creative Europe project "G-Book 3: Audience engagement activities for the social and emotional education of EU teens through gender-positive literature and digital technology" (2024-2027) and was co-Principal Investigator in DCU for "G-Book 2: European teens as readers and creators" (2020-2023). She is also the current Chair of the judging panel for the national KPMG Children's Books Ireland Awards and regularly reviews new children's and YA fiction for Children's Books Ireland (CBI). She is a member of the Editorial Boards for the international  journals New Directions in the Humanities and Anuario de Investigación en Literatura Infantil y Juvenil (AILIJ).