Dr
Maria
Loftus
Academic biography
Maria Loftus is an Assistant Professor in French in the School of Applied Languages and Intercultural Studies. She holds a primary degree in Irish and French with higher degrees in French Literature and Language, Discourse and Representations, Applied Linguistics and a PhD in Sub-Saharan Documentary Cinema from French and Irish universities. Having published in international journals in the areas of protest and documentary cinema and visual representations of colonisation, she has also explored the Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) field of students as creators of video content within a SLA context.
More recently, her published work is centred at the nexus of creative outputs, social empathy and anti-racism.
She is the co-recipient of Research Ireland's New Foundations funding with her colleague Fiona Murphy in 2023 and 2024.
Research interests
She has co-supervised a PhD in designed and emerging affordances in tutor-learner multimodal interactions in video-conferencing. Currently she is co-supervising two PhDs on blended short mobilities and language learning and creativity and modal verbs for SL learners.
Maria welcomes proposals from prospective PhD students interested in the areas of student created multimedia content for the SLA classroom, telecollaboration and peer-led informal language learning.