ProfessorMary Gallagher

‘If witness literature is to find its place, take on a task in relation to the enormity of what is happening in acts of destruction and their aftermath, it is in the tensions of sensibility, the intense awareness, the antennae of receptivity to the lives among which writers experience their own as a source of their art.’
(Nadine Gordimer, 1991 Nobel Laureate for Literature, ‘Literary Witness in a World of Terror’)

ACADEMIC QUALIFICATIONS

I completed my undergraduate studies in French and German at Trinity College Dublin (BA Mod), then graduated with a DEA in French Literature (Pre-Doctoral qualification) from the Université de Paris VII, Denis Diderot. My DEA research was supervised by Julia Kristeva.

For my doctoral studies (on the poetics of difference/otherness/diversity), I worked with Henri Meschonnic at the Université de Paris VIII, Vincennes-Saint-Denis and graduated from there with a Doctorat ès Lettres. Martinican author Edouard Glissant chaired the viva committee. 

For three of the four years of my postgraduate studies in Paris, I held a research studentship at the École Normale Supérieure.
My studies were also supported by a two-year Research Bursary awarded by the French Government and by a three-year Research Scholarship from TCD.

More recent (professional) qualifications are a Higher Diploma in Mediation and a Diploma in Arbitration Law and Procedure (both from UCD).

Academic Appointments

While completing my doctoral studies, I worked as an English-language teaching assistant for two years at the Université de Paris III (Sorbonne Nouvelle).

First  positions in Ireland were as Lecturer in French and German at the Dundalk Institute of Technology (two years), and then as Lecturer in French at NUI Maynooth (five years). I was appointed to UCD in 1991 and subsequently held positions as a Visiting Professor in several French universities, notably Paris III Sorbonne Nouvelle, Cergy-Pontoise and Orléans. 

Other university appointments were as External Examiner (for undergraduate and taught masters programmes in French Studies) at the University of Aberdeen and at Queen’s University Belfast. Also served as External Examiner for doctoral research degrees awarded by several other universities , mainly in Europe (especially the UK and France) but also in Australia.

Research Development Roles

* Founder member (1989) of the pioneering, UK-based Association for the Study of Caribbean and African Literature in French and Editor of  22 of the 25 issues of the Association's biennial journal. ASCALF was reinvented in 2002 as the Association of Francophone Postcolonial Studies - see sfps.org.uk/about/. 

* Founder member (1998) of the Irish Association of French and Francophone Studies (ADEFFI) and President of the association between 2006 and 2008. 

*  PI on the 'World Writing in French' (2006-2009) research programme run by UCD's Humanities Institute with PRTLI funding.

* Member of the Editorial Boards of the US-based Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, the Polish journal Forum Poetiki, and on the editorial committees of several monograph series, most notably Palgrave (Literary ethnography), Gallimard (Cahiers Saint-John Perse), Brill (Monographies de littérature française) and Peter Lang (Littératures de langue française).

* Convenor from 2018 to 2022 of UCD's cross-college Asia-Pacific Research Forum (formed 2017). This is now a Research Centre, directed 2022-24 by Dr Alex Dukalskis from within SPIRE in the College of Social Sciences and Law and 2024-26 by Dr Steffen Rimner from within UCD History in the College of Arts/Humanities. 

*Still ongoing (in 2026) Educational and Research Partnerships around  literary exchange were launched under the auspices of Erasmus+ in 2017-8 with the Université des Antilles in the French Caribbean, with the Université de Tunis in  2018-19 and in 2023/4 with the Université Nationale du Vietnam. 

*A further initiative (linking a number of colleagues from UCD and other universities) was a whole-island Irish research group launched in 2021-22 by two UCD colleagues, Dr Michael Wiedorn and Mary Gallagher, around Former French Island Colonies. This group was stood down on the untimely death of Michael Wiedorn in November 2022, RIP.

Book Outputs 1998-2005: FRANCOPHONE CARIBBEAN STUDIES

Caribbean Studies centre on cultures of displacement, domination, diversity and dissensus (the legacy of European chattel slavery, institutionalised racism and extractive hypercapitalism).

* My first two monographs studied the poetics, ethics and politics of the culturally complex and diverse post-colonial Caribbean. The first book, on the Creole identity of the Caribbean-born 1960 Nobel laureate (the poet, Saint-John Perse), was published by Gallimard (Paris) in 1998. It was informed by the ethics of the Jewish Lithuanian thinker, Emmanuel Levinas, and on the poet(h)ics of the Martinican thinker and poet, Édouard Glissant, who wrote the preface. The second, on the poetics of space and time in French Caribbean Writing since 1950, was published by Oxford University Press in 2002. 

* In 1999 an international conference at UCD on Caribbean literature in French issued in an edited book of essays on the writing of place and displacement in the Francophone Caribbean (published 2003 by Rodopi (Amsterdam)).

* In 2003-4, L'Harmattan (Paris) published new critical editions (in three volumes) of the 1920s French translations of Lafcadio Hearn's Creole writings. Hearn's turn-of-the century travel writings are still monumentally important as eye-witness accounts of the French-speaking Caribbean.



Book Outputs 2006-2011: WORLD WRITING IN FRENCH

From 2005, my research interests widened out from the French Caribbean when PRTLI funding was invested in a Project on World Writing in French (via the Humanities Institute of Ireland at UCD). Apart from the five international symposia and conferences held in UCD under the auspices of this project, the outputs include four published volumes:

 
* A special issue on 'Empire and Culture Now' of the UK journal, Modern and Contemporary France co-edited with Dr Douglas Smith;
* Two volumes of essays, one on the sense and presence of the subject in contemporary poetry in French, and the other on the work of migrancy, both co-edited with Prof. Michael Brophy. 
* A volume of essays on the wider problematic of globalization with the University of Toronto press. This was published in 2008.

Book Outputs 2012-2017: CRITIQUE AND DISSENSUS IN AN ERA OF ANGLO-GLOBALIST DOMINATION

*In 2012, an independent Irish publisher (The Liffey Press) brought out my study of the risks posed by globalized corporatism and managerialism to the integrity of Higher Education in early 21st-century universities.

* This reflection continued into a volume of essays co-edited with Dr Jeanne Riou (UCD German) on the theme of Ressentiment (Re-Thinking Ressentiment). This book was published in 2016 in Germany by Transcript.


2018-2024: FURTHER FRANCOPHONE CARIBBEAN WORK AND A SHOAH-RELATED PROJECT

* In 2018, Signal Books brought out an annotated (first) translation of Paul Morand's Caribbean travel diary from 1929. The publication was endorsed as a particularly timely project by the Nobel Laureate, J. M. G. Le Clézio. Morand’s writing makes for queasy reading on how Europe's and America's place in the world was perceived by one of France's more explicitly race-obsessed authors of the blithely colonialist and casually anti-semitic 1920s. Morand's unfiltered writing communicates the hubris of an 'über-European' sense of unsubtly signaled settled, ie. non-Jewish, superiority firmly based on the white-supremacist phobia of miscegenation.

* In 2022 my transcription, translation and critical annontation of Paul Léon's Letters from Drancy concentration camp were published by Bloomsbury. Léon was a Russian-born Jewish refugee to London, then to Paris in the early 1920s. He worked in Paris as a noted and well-published translator and independent legal scholar. His main publications concern the political thought of the anarchist thinker Bakunin and of French Enlightenment thinkers Jean-Jacques Rousseau and  Benjamin Constant.  As part of James Joyce's friendship circle in Paris he also worked as Joyce's unpaid polyglot advisor on linguistic matters and as his accounting and legal 'fixer'  from 1928 up until his arrest and imprisonment in the concentration/transit camps of Drancy and Compiègne along with a group of Jewish lawyers in occupied Paris in 1941. He was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in March 1942 and shot there a few weeks later. 

*2023 saw the publication of my critical edition of the 1938 French translation of the most literary of Lafcadio Hearn's New Orleans writings: his 'Creole Fantastics' and his 'Floridian Reveries'.  This work was published in Paris in Roger Little's famous 'Autrement Mêmes' series (L'Harmattan).