DR. DECLAN KIBERD is Keough Professor of Irish Studies at University of Notre Dame. He was for many years Chair of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama at University College Dublin. Among his books are Synge and the Irish Language (1979), Men and Feminism in Modern Literature (1985), Idir Dhá Chultúr (1991), Inventing Ireland (1995), Irish Classics (2000), The Irish Writer and the World (2005) and Ulysses and Us (2009). He recently co-edited Handbook of the Irish Revival (2015) with PJ Mathews. He has been a member of the Board of the Abbey Theatre and Director of the Yeats Summer and Winter Schools. He has lectured in more than thirty countries and been visiting professor at the Sorbonne, at Magdalene College Cambridge and at Duke University. Last November he delivered the Edward Said Memorial lecture at Columbia University, New York.

DR. GERARDINE MEANEY is Professor of Cultural Theory and Director of the UCD Humanities Institute. She was previously Vice-Principal for Research and Innovation in the College of Arts and Celtic Studies and Director of the Centres for the Study of Gender, Culture and Identities and for Film Studies at UCD.  Her current research interests are centred on gender, ethnic and national identities in literature and culture, and on the application of new digital methodologies to humanities research. She has published extensively on gender and culture in Ireland, some of her most recent publications including Reading the Irish Woman: Cultural Encounter and Exchange, 1714-1960, with Bernadette Whelan and Mary O'Dowd (2013); Gender, Ireland and Cultural Change (2010); and (Un)like Subjects: Women, Theory, Fiction (1993; reissued in 2012). She was also one of the major co-editors of the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing: Women's Writing and Traditions, volumes 4 and 5 (2002).

DR. MAUREEN O’CONNOR is a full-time lecturer at University College Cork. She was educated in the US, where she taught in a number of undergraduate programmes. In Ireland, she held an IRCHSS Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Moore Institute in the National University of Ireland, Galway, and has also lectured at the National University of Ireland, Galway, as well as at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick. Some of her current research interests are Irish women writers of the nineteenth and twentieth century, transatlantic Irishness of the fin de siècle period, the dandy, and Ireland and ecocriticism/ecofeminism. She has published extensively in Irish Studies, some of her most recent publications including The Animal in Irish Women’s Writing (2010); Back to the Future of Irish Studies  (editor, 2010); Edna O’Brien: New Critical Perspectives (co-editor with Kathryn Laing and Sinéad Mooney, 2006); Ireland and India: Colonies, Culture, and Empire (co-editor with Tadhg Foley, 2006). She is currently working on a monograph on Edna O’Brien, as well as in a special issue of the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies on Ireland and Ecocriticism, both forthcoming in 2016.