Professor Michael J. Breen
Professor Michael Breen is Dean of Arts at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick. He is national director for Ireland of the European Values Study and a director of the Centre for Culture, Technology and Values, at Mary Immaculate College. His academic qualifications include a BA from UCD, BD from the University of St. Thomas Aquinas, Rome; MA in Television, Radio & Film and PhD in Mass Communications from Syracuse University. Prior to coming to Limerick, he taught at Trinity College Dublin and at Syracuse University. His research interests are in the area of social values and cultural change, and the influence of mass media on both of these. A former IRCHSS fellow, he currently serves as a member of the Council.
An tOllamh Ailbhe Ó Corráin
Ailbhe Ó Corráin is Professor of Irish at the University of Ulster, Magee and Visiting Professor in Celtic at the University of Uppsala, Sweden. He was formerly lecturer in Celtic Languages at the University of Bonn and Head of Celtic at the University of Uppsala. He is editor of Studia Celtica Upsaliensia, Vice-President of Societas Celtologica Nordica and a former president of the European Society for Irish Studies. He was made a Docent of the University of Uppsala in 1992. He sits on the Committee of the International Congress of Celtic Studies, the Irish Board of Atlas Linguarum Europae, the Peer Review College of the AHRC and was formerly on the Advisory Board of the UK Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies. He is a board member of HSIS and the DHO. He has written and edited ten books and published extensively on the syntax and semantics of Irish. Recent articles include: ‘Identity as a Cognitive Code: The Northern Irish Experience’ in Cultural Identities and National Borders, Gothenburg, Sweden 2009, pp. 35-48. ‘On the Emergence of the Progressive and Other Verbal Aspects in Irish’, in Dialectologica et Geolinguistica 16, Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, 2008, pp.3-26. ‘On the Origins and Development of Periphrastic Perfects in Irish’ in Proceedings of the Eighth Symposium of Societas Celtologica Nordica, Uppsala 2007, pp. 165 – 185. Perfect Constructions in Insular Celtic Voprosy Jazikoznania, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow 2007. ‘On the ‘After Perfect’ in Irish and Hiberno-English’ in The Celtic Englishes IV, Potsdam 2006, pp.152-172.
Dr Peadar Ó Flatharta
Dr Ó Flatharta is a native Irish speaker from the Galway Gaeltacht. He has a doctorate from Brunel University; MSc from Trinity College and a primary degree from NUI Galway. He was a member of the Government Gaeltacht Commission 2000-2002 and lead an international team in preparing a draft national 20 year strategy for the Irish language for the Department of Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs in 2009. He is Senior Lecturer in DCU and head of School of FIONTAR 2003-2004. He has broad teaching experience at the various levels of the Irish educational system and he has a particular interest in issues of language and society.
Dr Tadhg Ó hIfearnáin
BA (1988) and PhD (1994) in Irish from the University of Ulster at Coleraine. Before joining the University of Limerick in 1996, from 1990 he worked in the Breton and Celtic Department of the Université de Haute Bretagne - Rennes 2. Primarily a sociolinguist, he has worked on many field-based and theoretical projects in Ireland, insular and continental Europe and in North America. His research projects, on his own or with collaborators and research students, are in the areas of: language policy, ideology and practice in the Gaeltacht; standardisation and revitalisation; sociolinguistic distance - mutual influence, interdialectal and cross-language partial communication; young people’s language; theories of diglossia and language conflict. He also teaches aspects of Gaelic Irish culture, society and language from the 17th century to contemporary times. He is currently president of the Irish Association for Applied Linguistics and a member of several international journals' editorial boards; Language Policy, Sociolinguistic Studies and the AILA Review.