ProfessorEmily Mark-FitzGerald

Professor Mark-FitzGerald is an art and cultural historian specializing in Irish art history, visual culture, museum/heritage studies and cultural policy from the 19th c. - present. She is also active in the Irish arts and cultural sector as a writer, policy commentator, occasional curator, and educator, across the Irish visual and performing arts and museum/heritage sector.

Research expertise includes:
- 19th - 20th c. public art and commemoration
- the visual and material culture of famine, poverty, migration, and diaspora (19th-20th c) across media (painting, engraving, photography, cinema, material and museum culture)
- Irish cultural heritage and memory - Irish social history and public heritage practice
- museums, exhibition practice and Irish arts/cultural policy

Her book 'Commemorating the Irish Famine: Memory and the Monument' (Liverpool University Press 2013; paperback 2015) investigated the visual history and commemoration of the Irish Famine in local, national and global context. Praised as a 'landmark' text in Irish Studies (Irish Arts Review, 2014) it surveyed over one hundred and forty post-1990 monuments built in Ireland, Northern Ireland, England, Scotland, Wales, Canada, Australia and the United States, and the visual and commemorative culture (Irish and international) out of which they emerged. This was followed by a new co-edited volume 'The Great Irish Famine: Visual and Material Culture' published with Liverpool University Press in 2018, and a forthcoming co-edited volume on 'Dublin and the Great Irish Famine'. Dr Mark-FitzGerald has lectured extensively on related Irish Studies topics across the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Malta, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Monaco, Poland, Ukraine, Turkey, Australia, the United States, and Canada.

Her primary current research project is 'Irish Visual Culture, Social Conflict, and Crisis (c. 1840-1900)', an intermedial study of mid 19th c. - early 20th c. representations of Irish poverty, which explores the relationship between technological change and the depiction of the Irish social subject - spanning the rapid and parallel development of the illustrated press, photography, stereoscopy, magic lanterns, optical devices, and early cinema.