Assoc ProfessorRoisin Kennedy

Dr. Róisín Kennedy is a graduate of UCD and the University of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on the critical reception of modern art in Ireland, the role and function of art writing post 1880, censorship and on the position of women as artists and subjects in modern art. She completed an IRCHSS funded PhD on Politics of Vision: Critical Writing on Art in Ireland, 1939 -1972 in 2006. She has published widely on the subject in edited collections and in Circa and Third Text. She was awarded an Arts Council Bursary in Curatorship by the Arts Council in 1998 for which she curated and catalogued the historic and contemporary state collection at Dublin Castle, and wrote Dublin Castle Art, (1999). She is former Yeats Curator at the National Gallery of Ireland, (2006-08), where she curated The Fantastic in Irish Art and Masquerade and Spectacle: The Travelling Fair in the Work of Jack B. Yeats in 2007. She co-curated Hair and Hegemony at the Highlanes Gallery in 2017. She co-edited Nobody's Business, The Aran Diaries of Ernie O'Malley (2017), Harry Clarke and Artistic Visions of the New Irish State (2018) and Censoring Art. Silencing the Artwork (2018). Her monograph, Art and the Nation State. The Reception of Modern Art in Ireland was published by Liverpool University Press in 2021. She edited Visualizing the Celtic Revival. The Arts and Crafts movement in Ireland – selected writings by Nicola Gordon Bowe, published by Four Courts Press, in 2024. She organised a symposium on The legacy and contribution of Michael Scott to the arts and culture of Modern Ireland which was held on 29 November 2024 in the Irish Architectural Archive and is currently editing an anthology of papers for publication in 2027.  She was keynote speaker in the conference New Histories of Irish Art and Modernism. A Conference in Honour of S. B. Kennedy, organised by the Keough-Naughton Institute of Irish Studies, Notre Dame, held at Ulster Museum and Queen's University, Belfast 22-23 May 2025. She co-edited a special edition of Eire-Ireland, 'Ireland in Transition: Visual Culture, Technology and Modernity in the Free State',  with Dr Elaine Sisson, 2025.