DrClare Ní Cheallaigh

Clare's research is fundamentally invested in global regimes of knowledge dissemination with a focus on decolonial theory and methodologies and on African literature and publishing history. Her current work on the SCRiBe project explores the conceptualisation of "open" in open access movements and infrastructure in Africa. This research aims to increase our understanding of the inequities of knowledge production and highlight the barriers, and potential solutions, for creating collaborative research systems that foster bibliodiversity. 
 
Her PhD research examined how African writers, whose work is connected both to oral storytelling and to written literature, navigate the collision of these two conflicting systems of knowledge dissemination. The thesis theorises a hybrid artistic identity, the "storyteller-author", to provide an analytical category for writers who bring a storyteller's sensibility to the institutions of authorship, and who thereby unsettle and defamiliarise the entrenched ideological foundations of contemporary modes of literary creation and publication. The authors discussed in this project are D. O. Fágúnwà, Amos Tutuola, Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi and Akwaeke Emezi with a final chapter on digital forms of oral tradition.
 
Her research interests therefore encompass modern and contemporary African literature, particularly the authors listed, as well as concepts of orality and authorship, regimes of copyright and early missionary publishers in Nigeria.