Leadership

US-Ireland Alliance High School Content Advisory Committee

John Cromie is the CTO of Touch Press. John graduated from Trinity College Dublin with first class honours in Software and Electronics Engineering and went on to complete a research masters. He is a software and digital business professional with 20+ years of experience delivering successful projects on leading desktop, web and mobile platforms. He has completed several projects with the Apple QuickTime team and has authored a book in the QuickTime Developer series. Software architecture and cross-platform development are areas of special interest. John has developed extensively on the iPhone and iPad platforms for his natural history business BirdGuides, and other clients, and now leads the software team at Touch Press. He is a keen naturalist and is active in conservation and research in Ireland. Cromie currently serves as chairman of BirdWatch Ireland, the leading nature conservation charity in Ireland. He is based in County Donegal, Ireland.

Roddy Doyle is a writer who lives and works in Dublin. His novels include The Commitments, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, which won the Booker Prize in 1993, The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, A Star Called Henry, and Paula Spencer. His latest novel, The Dead Republic, will be published in April 2010. His books for children and young people include The Giggler Treatment and Wilderness. He has also written for the stage. Most recently, he co-wrote, with Bisi Adigun, a new version of The Playboy of the Western World, which was produced by the Abbey Theatre. His screenplays include The Commitments, co-written with Dick Clement and Ian LaFrenais, The Snapper, The Van, and When Brendan Met Trudy.

Roy Foster is the Carroll Professor of Irish History at the University of Oxford. He obtained his M.A. and Ph.D. at Trinity College and was previously, Professor of Modern British History at Birkbeck College, University of London and held visiting fellowships at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, and the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton and Princeton University. He has written widely on Irish history, society and politics in the modern period, as well as on Victorian high politics and culture; and the authorized biography of Yeats. In 2009, he delivered the Clark Lectures in English Literature at the University of Cambridge. He currently holds a Wolfson Research Professorship to write a study of the Irish revolution of the early twentieth century.

His publications include:

Charles Stewart Parnell: the Man and his Family

Lord Randolph Churchill: a Political Life

The Oxford Illustrated History of Ireland

Modern Ireland 1600-1972

Paddy and Mr Punch: Connections in Irish and English History

W.B. Yeats, A Life, Volume I: The Apprentice Mage, 1865-1914

The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making it up in Ireland

W.B. Yeats, A Life, II: The Arch-Poet 1915-1939

Luck and the Irish: a brief history of change, 1970-2000

Joe Lee

Joe Lee is Professor of History, Glucksman Professor for Irish Studies, and Director of Glucksman Ireland House, at New York University. He was Professor of Modern History/History at University College Cork from 1974 to 2002. His areas of research include 19th and 20th Century Irish, English, European, and Irish American history and politics; nationalism, imperialism, and post colonialism; Irish Diaspora; Historiography. He formerly served as a member of the British-Irish Parliamentary Body, Chair of the Fulbright Commission for Ireland, and president of the Irish Association for European Studies. He is a member of the Royal Irish Academy. At UCC, he served as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and as Vice-President. He also served in the Irish Senate for five years. He graduated from UCD with first class honors in History and Economics. He was also educated at the Institute for European History in Mainz, Germany, and was elected a Fellow of Peterhouse and was awarded an Hon. D. Litt. by the National University of Ireland in 1986.

His publications include:

Ireland 1912-1985 Politics & Society

The Modernisation of Irish Society, 1848-1928 (Dublin, 1973)

Making the Irish American, Editor, with Marion R. Casey

Declan Kiberd is Chair of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama at University College Dublin. He joined UCD as lecturer in Anglo-Irish literature in 1979, having taught English previously in the University of Kent at Canterbury (1976-7), and Irish in Trinity College Dublin (1977-9). He was appointed Chair of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama at UCD in 1997. He has also been Director of the Yeats International Summer School (1985-7), Patron of the Dublin Shaw Society (1995-2000), a columnist with the Irish Times (1985-7) and the Irish Press (1987-93), the presenter of the RTE Arts programme, Exhibit A (1984-6), and a regular essayist and reviewer in the Irish Times, TLS, London Review of Books and the New York Times. He is the editor of numerous books, pamphlets, essays, reviews, BBC scripts, and public lectures and has won numerous prizes for his publications. Declan was educated at Trinity College Dublin (First Class Degree with Gold Medal in English and Irish); D.Phil (Oxford). He is a member of the Royal Irish Academy.

His publications include:

Synge and the Irish Language

Men and Feminism in Modern Literature

Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation

Irish Classics

The Irish Writer and the World

Maureen Murphy is Professor of Curriculum and Teaching at Hofstra University where she also served as Dean of the School of Education and Allied Human Services from 2005-2008. She is the editor of Asenath Nicholson’s Annals of the Famine in Ireland (1998) and Ireland’s Welcome to the Stranger (2002) and the co-editor of An Irish Literature Reader (2006). Maureen was the Director of the New York State Great Irish Famine Curriculum; it won the National Council of the Social Studies Award for Program Excellence in 2002. A past president of the American Conference for Irish Studies and a past chair of the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures, Maureen is one of the six senior editors of the Dictionary of Irish Biography which will be published in nine volumes and on line by the Royal Irish Academy and Cambridge University Press. She is the historian for the highly-acclaimed Irish Hunger Memorial at Battery Park City. She was a Visiting Fellow at the Humanities Institute at University College, Dublin in 2004 and is a frequent lecturer at the Yeats International Summer School in Sligo.

Geraldine Kennedy recently served as the Editor of the Irish Times. She started as a reporter there was elected the first woman chairman of the Oireachtas (Irish Parliament) Press Gallery, at the age of 24. As Political Correspondent for the Sunday Tribune, she became the first woman Political Correspondent in Ireland, at the age of 29. In 1982, her home telephone was tapped with an official warrant signed by the Minister for Justice in order to find out the sources of her stories. She was threatened, intimidated and followed and had Garda/police protection for a period. These, and subsequent events, are documented in “The Boss” by Joe Joyce and Peter Murtagh. For five years, she was Political Correspondent of the Sunday Press following the closure of the Sunday Tribune. In 1984, when some of the transcripts of her private conversations were leaked and published in the media, she, and another journalist who was also tapped, took a joint legal action against the State. The 1987 judgment in Kennedy and Arnold v Ireland and the Attorney General found that the tapping was unconstitutional, an invasion of privacy and an abuse of power by the State. From 1987-1989, Geraldine was a Member of the Dáil (Irish parliament) as a member of the Progressive Democrats. During that period she served as Spokesman on Foreign Affairs and Northern Ireland and Chief Whip of the party. In 1989, she lost her Dáil seat and left politics to return to journalism. After that, she held various positions with the Irish Times and became the first woman editor in the history of the newspaper.

Fiona Shaw, a graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, has long been a fixture on the British stage where she is admired for her mastery of Shakespeare and the Greek classics. She is the recipient of numerous honors, including several Oliver Awards. She has also performed in numerous television productions for the BBC. She was nominated for a Tony Award for her 2003 performance as Medea. She first came to the attention of film audiences in Jim Sheridan’s 1989 Oscar Award winning film, My Left Foot. She has given many memorable performances, including that of Mrs. Nugent in Neil Jordan’s film The Butcher Boy. Other film credits include 3 Men and a Little Lady starring Tom Selleck, Ted Danson and Steve Guttenbeg; Fracture with Anthony Hopkins and Ryan Gosling; and The Black Dahlia with Hilary Swank and Josh Hartnett. In 2008, she teamed up with long-time collaborator/director Deborah Warner for a production of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days at the National Theatre London, the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., BAM and The Abbey. In 2008, Fiona, directed her first opera, Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Riders to the Sea, to rave reviews in London. She is currently performing in Mother Courage and Her Children at the National. In 2010, she and Warner revived their production of T. S Elliot’s The Waste Land at the National and she also starred there with Simon Russell Beale in a Nicholas Hynter production of "London Assurance.” She was recently seen in the Harry Potter films and in Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life, with Sean Penn and Brad Pitt. She has also directed the operas Elegy for Young Lovers at the Young Vic and The Marriage of Figaro at the ENO.