Lecturer

Email: aoife.connolly@tudublin.ie

Dr Aoife Connolly lectures in French Studies at Technological University Dublin. She previously worked as a French lecturer at Queen’s University Belfast and at National University of Ireland, Galway. Her research examines French decolonisation, particularly the gendered dynamics of colonial processes and memory communities of the Algerian war (1954-62). Her book, Performing the Pied-Noir Family: Constructing Narratives of Settler Memory and Identity in Literature and On-Screen (Lexington Books, Lanham, MD: 2020) focuses on an especially neglected aspect of decolonisation – the former European settlers of Algeria known as the pieds-noirs, a million of whom migrated to metropolitan France as Algerian independence approached. Described as “the first book to explore how gender roles are modeled by French-Algerian settler characters in both literature and film relating to colonial Algeria”, the book provides a “much needed and elucidating study on the performativity of Pied-Noir gender roles” (H-France Review). Other gender-focused publications include: Aoife Connolly, “Telling Tales of Conquest and Independence: Feminising (French) Algeria”, in Gender. Nation. Text. Exploring Constructs of Identity, ed. Lorraine Kelly, Tina-Karen Pusse, and Jennifer Wood (London: LIT, 2017) and Aoife Connolly, “Women as Keepers of Algerian and Pied-Noir Identity?”, Socheolas 4, no. 1 (April 2012): 22–36.

Research/Practice Interests: French decolonisation; memory communities of the Algerian war; French and Francophone literature and film; young adult literature; gender, memory and identity studies.

Links: Sample publications can be found on TU Dublin's open access research repository, Arrow@TU Dublin