Academic biography

Dr Áine McGillicuddy 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 the books Creative Readings in Multilingual Picturebooks. International and Transnational Pespectives and Politics and Ideology in Children's Literature. She has also authored a monograph, articles and book chapters on topics ranging from the bilingual Franco-German writer René Schickele (1883-1940), child exiles from the Nazi era to picturebooks engaging with migration in contemporary contexts. 

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

Currently, Áine is Principal Investigator 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). In addition she is a member of the DAAD-funded project: Elizabeth Shaw's Irish Berlin (2025-2026).

Áine 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) and specialist children's literature studies journals, such as Bookbird. 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).