Local Organising Committee

Andrew Ó Baoill, LOC Chair
Lecturer in English, University of Galway

Dr Ó Baoill is co-chair of the Community Communication and Alternative Media Section of IAMCR. His work focuses on political economy of alternative and activist media.

Rounwah Bseiso
Lecturer in Journalism and Media, University of Galway

Dr Bseiso’s first monograph Revolutionary Art and Politics in Egypt: Liminal Spaces and Cultural Production After 2011 (I.B. Tauris, 2023) is part of the first scholarly series published by Bloomsbury Academic that engages with a de-colonial, non-Euro centric approach to addressing the relationship between politics, communication and culture in the Middle East and North Africa from the perspective of key actors and states in the region, and its peoples.

Daniel Carey
Established Professor of English, University of Galway

Professor Carey is Secretary of the Royal Irish Academy and former chair of the Irish Research Council (2022-24). He was director of the Moore Institute 2014-23. His work focuses on intellectual history in the Enlightenment, the history of early modern travel and colonialism.

Seán Crosson
Associate Professor in the Huston School of Film & Digital Media, University of Galway

Dr Crosson is Co-Director of the BA Performance and Screen Studies. He was President of the European Federation of Associations and Centres of Irish Studies (EFACIS) from 2013-2019 and is a member of the Irish Classification of Films Appeal Board. He is Project Leader of the Sport in European Cinema initiative, a research and education platform and database capturing the extraordinary story of how sport has featured across the history of European cinema. He is on the Management Committee of the EU COST Action PLURILINGMEDIA (Language Plurality in Europe’s Changing Media Sphere).

Elaine Feeney
Lecturer in Creative Writing, University of Galway

Ms Feeney is a writer and educator. Her second novel, How to Build a Boat, was long-listed for the Booker Prize in 2023.

Kelly Fincham
Lecturer in Journalism and Media, University of Galway

Dr Fincham is director of the BA in Global Media. A former journalist, she was founding editor of IrishCentral.com, the industry-leading US-based Irish web site.

Anthony Kelly
Government of Ireland Post-doctoral Fellow, University College Dublin

Dr Kelly is based in the School of Information and Communication Studies at UCD. His project, funded by Taighde Éireann - Research Ireland, examines the antagonistic practices of political influencer social media audiences.

Maria O’Brien
Lecturer in Taxation, University of Galway

Dr O’Brien’s work focuses on taxation, law, and cultural policy. She is chair of the board of Imirt, the Irish games industry representative body. She is also chair of the board of MeCCSA Policy Network. She is co-founder of the Irish branch of the Digital Games Research Association, DiGRA Ireland. Her monograph on tax incentives for the creative industries will be published by Palgrave in summer 2025.

Seán Ryder
Established Professor of English, University of Galway

Former Head of the School of English, Media and Creative Arts. He has served as Irish national expert to the Programme Committee for the European Commission's Horizon 2020 research programme, and served as Chair of the HERA consortium (Humanities in the European Research Area) from 2012-2018. His research interests include digital humanities and eco-criticism.

Justin Tonra
Associate Professor in English, University of Galway

Dr Tonra is the inaugural Academic Integrity Officer at University of Galway. He is the author of a book on the poetry of Thomas Moore and is a digital humanities scholar who has worked on projects including ÚRSCÉAL, Eververse, Ossian Online and Personæ. He is currently completing research for the IRC-funded project, "Poetry Machines: Technologies of Poetic Composition."

Erin A. McCarthy
Established Professor of English Literature and Computational Humanities, University of Galway 

Prof. McCarthy is the Principal Investigator of the European Research Council-funded project “STEMMA: Systems of Transmitting Early Modern Manuscript Verse, 1475–1700” at the University of Galway. She is the author of Doubtful Readers: Print, Poetry, and the Reading Public (Oxford University Press, 2020), which was named an Outstanding Academic Title by CHOICE and won the 2020 John Donne Society Award for Distinguished Publication.  

Dian Puspita
PhD candidate at University of Galway