Moynagh Sullivan

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

I am currently the Faculty of Arts HEA PATH4 Universal Design for Learning (UDL) Fellow (2023-2025)

A former Fulbright Scholar in Irish Studies at UC Berekely (2009), I was also Visiting Fellow in Irish Studies at the Centre for Irish Studies/Moore Institute at UG, Spring 2022, and  I was Visiting Professor In Irish Studies at the Centre for Irish Studies at Boston College, Autumn 2021.

I was Associate Dean for Equality, Diversity, Inclusion & Interculturalism, Faculty of Arts. I shared 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 was 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, examining intersections of gender, sexuality, neurodiversity, race, ethnicity and class 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  by concerns of social and environmental justice.

My critical lens is eclectic and allows for experiential and affective topologies to be linked to wider cultural practices to do with embodiment and material practices. Recent research in trauma studies, neuroscience, Polyvagal theory and evolutionary biology have refreshed my longstanding interest in pschyoanalysis, especially in Attachment Theory and Object Relations, and I am exploring how 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 and environmental justice can be meaningfully addressed. My work in exploring visual art practice extends these enquiries.

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 recognised in a USI and National Forum National Teaching Hero Award 2021, and in my selection as an Advance HE Innovative Assessment Torch Bearer. 

I have served as a Fulbright mentor and am currently a mentor on the Mothernet project, as well as in the Faculty of Arts.

I have supervised PhDs on motherhood and reproductive politics, gender, aging, class and sexuality in fiction, drama, art, poetry and performance art, and have mentored post-doctoral fellow working in celibacy in 2Oth century Irish women's writing.  I welcome Ph.D. proposals in these and any of the other areas listed in my research fields, and I actively encourage proposals from neurodivergent students and researchers.

I was PI on the IRC-funded project Mamecology, in which I partnered with the Irish Cancer Society (ICS).  Mamecology is a 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, 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, and a member of Mothernet, a Horizon 2020 Twinning Project between MU, Vilnius University, Lithuania and Uppsala University, Sweden. 

I am currently working on a Monograph on Motherhood and Irish Contemporary Culture. 

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

@MoynaghSulliva
@mamecologyart
@Mother_Cultures
@mother_net