Moynagh Sullivan

I am a Professor of English, with specialties in Gender, Intersectionality, Motherhood, and Irish Studies.

I was Visiting Fellow in Irish Studies at the Centre for Irish Studies/Moore Institute at NUIG, in Spring 2022, and in the autumn semester of 2021, I was Visiting Professor In Irish Studies at the Centre for Irish Studies at Boston College, both leading global centres for Irish Studies.

I am also Associate Dean for Equality, Diversity, Inclusion & Interculturalism, Faculty of Arts, Celtic Studies and Philosophy. I share this role with my colleague, Dr Catherine Gander; we submitted a pioneering co-application for the position of Associate Dean to create possibilities and models for a gender-responsive and flexible method of collaborative leadership.  In my role as EDI Associate Dean, I am also the co-chair of the Faculty Self-Assessment Team (SAT) for the Athena SWAN Bronze Award application and am the first chair of the Implementation Group for the FACSP Gender Equality Action Plan.

A long-standing and deep commitment to equality, inclusion, and diversity has been a core value of my work in research, teaching, and service. My work has focused on diversifying culture by examining cultural gender gaps, ableism, and by mapping the overlooked and unseen maternal imaginaries -- or, in other words, the shapes and practices of motherhood and care so often unnamed, as well as under- or unpaid, in culture and society. I have examined intersections of these areas in the fields of Irish writing, as well as contemporary poetry, fiction, art, and popular culture more broadly, and I have published extensively in these areas. These diverse practices are linked in my work by my consistent engagement with intersectionality, social and environmental justice, and the psychoanalytic approach I take. This critical lens is eclectic, drawing on Attachment Theory, Object Relations, Anglo-American feminism as well as French feminist and Jungian psychoanalytical approaches.

The psychoanalytical lens allows for experiential and affective topologies to be linked to wider cultural practices. Recent research in trauma studies, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology have refreshed this practice, especially in the area of Polyvagal theory, and this combined with ecofeminism and queer ecology, as well as indigenous and feminist economic models of rematriation and gift economies, can help create responsive critical paradigms for understanding and integrating the innovative work of artist/activists seeking a sustainable future in which issues of social justice can be meaningfully addressed. I see this as part of the wider scholarly search for new modes of critical engagement to respond to the innovative ways in which artists and writers cross genre boundaries and merge modalities to create the interventions needed for the urgent crises that the planet currently faces.

Inclusion, diversity, and equality have also been driving principles in my teaching practice. In my work in Japan, at UCD, and at MU, I have created accessible, enabling, supportive, and motivating learning environments, a commitment recognized in a USI and National Forum National Teaching Hero Award 2021, and in my selection as an Advance HE Innovative Assessment Torch Bearer. 

The service roles I have pursued that include Associate Dean for Equality, Diversity, Inclusion & Interculturalism, MAP Officer, and Co-Chair of FACSP Athena Swan Committee reflect my dedication to equality across all sectors of university life.

I have supervised PhDs on motherhood and reproductive politics, gender, aging, class and sexuality in fiction, drama, art, and poetry, performance art, and I welcome Ph.D. proposals in these and any of the other areas listed in my research fields. As a former Fulbright Scholar in Irish Studies at UC Berekely (2009), I have served as a Fulbright mentor and am currently a mentor on the Horizon 2020-funded Mothernet project, as well as in the faculty of Arts, Celtic Studies and Philosophy, and I welcome applications from post-doctoral fellows.

I am currently PI on the IRC-funded project Mamecology, in which I partner with the Irish Cancer Society (ICS).  Mamecology is a curated virtual exhibition of artistic responses to breast cancer by both established artists and writers and by those who have turned to creative practices when faced with a diagnosis. Including writing, visual art practices, music, and performance, and it gathers expressions of the inner life of patients and loved ones, and provides a rich resource to assist with 'living well with, and through, cancer' (ICS). I am a former director of two MU Arts and Humanities research clusters (2011- 2015), a founding member of MU's Motherhood Project, which has successfully attracted funding from MU's Arts and Humanities Institute (AHI), and a member of Mothernet, a Horizon 2020 Twinning Project between MU, Vilnius University, Lithuania and Uppsala University, Sweden. 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/moynaghsullivan/
https://mamecology.ie/

@MoynaghSulliva
@mamecologyart
@Mother_Cultures
@mother_net