Mary Ann Bolger
Head of Discipline - Media Arts
Email: maryann.bolger@tudublin.ie
Tel: +353 1 220 5890
Profile
Dr Mary Ann Bolger is head of the discipline of Media Arts at the School of Media. She is a lecturer in Design History and Visual Culture and was previously programme chair of the Creative Arts Masters Platform and the BA in Creative Industries and Visual Culture in the School of Art & Design.
Mary Ann studied at Drama and History of Art at Trinity College Dublin and Design History and Material Culture at the Royal College of Art, London, where she also received her doctorate. Her PhD thesis was ‘Designing Modern Ireland: the role of graphic design in the construction of an image of modern Ireland at home and abroad (1949-1979).’ Current research interests include: design in and of Ireland; gender, politics, and visual culture; typography and language; the visual culture of the everyday; and the material culture of religion. She supervises PhDs in the areas of Irish design and visual culture, museum studies and typographic history.
Publications include the monograph Design Factory: On the Edge of Europe (Dublin: Lilliput & Amsterdam: BIS, 2009) and a chapter on typographic commemoration in Making 1916: Material and Visual Culture of the Easter Rising, edited by Lisa Godson and Joanna Brück (Liverpool University Press, 2015).
Mary Ann is a peer reviewer for the Journal of Design History, has served on the Professional Panel of the 100Archive and is a judge on both Professional and Graduate Awards at the Institute of Designers in Ireland. She represented Ireland as country delegate to the Association Typographique Internationale (ATypI) from 2005 to 2022. With Clare Bell, Mary Ann programmes the GradCAM research group Typography Ireland. She regularly presents papers at peer-reviewed conferences and speaks on radio about design and typography. She also works from time to time as a consultant with design firms and organisations.
Before moving to TU Dublin in 2009, Mary Ann taught at Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication (now part of University of Greenwich) and at Waterford Institute of Technology (now SETU).