Gerardine Meaney

Gerardine Meaney is a Full Professor of Cultural Theory in the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin (UCD). She serves as Director of the UCD Centre for Cultural Analytics and is Principal Investigator on a European Research Council (ERC) funded project on European Migrants in the British Imagination. Her academic leadership includes a previous role as Director of the UCD Humanities Institute (2011–2016).

Research Interests: Her scholarship spans gender, migration, national identities, cultural memory, and digital humanities. She integrates critical theory with innovative digital methodologies to analyze literature and culture. Her work emphasizes feminist theory, Irish women’s writing, modernism, and the intersection of technology and humanities.

The most recent publications reflect a strong trend toward computational and digital approaches in literary analysis, particularly using word embeddings and semantic networks to study gender in 19th-century fiction. Her research also continues to engage deeply with Irish cultural identity, modernist literature, and feminist literary recovery.

Scientific Awards and Honors:

• Member of the Royal Irish Academy
• Visiting Fellow, Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Edinburgh (2021–2022)

Advising and Grants: She has supervised PhD students as a thesis supervisor and led significant research projects, including ERC and Irish Research Council grants such as 'Contagion, Biopolitics and Migration in European Cultural Memory' and 'Inventing and Re-Inventing the Irish Woman: External Influences on Gender Construction 1760–2005'.

Labs and Teams: She leads the UCD Centre for Cultural Analytics, which supports digital humanities research, and has contributed to digital outreach projects including an iPad app on James Joyce’s 'The Dead' and the Irish Virtual Research Library and Archive.