Dr Natalie Harrower appointed Director of Digital Repository of Ireland

Dr Harrower has been Acting Director of the DRI since June 2015, in which role she  has worked to build DRI’s community profile and partnerships and was central to securing a long-term core funding stream for the DRI from the Irish government.

Dr Harrower has also secured leveraged funding from philanthropists (Atlantic Philanthropies), European funders (FP7, H2020), and Irish funders (SFI, Enterprise Ireland), and leads a number of leveraged projects for DRI, including the multiple award-winning Inspiring Ireland, and the Royal Irish Academy’s contributions to the collaborative DAH PhD programme. She established the international conference series DPASSH: Digital Preservation for the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities, and chaired its inaugural conference in June 2015. Dr Harrower serves on the OECD Global Science Forum High Level Expert Group on Sustainable Business Models for Data Repositories, she is on the Board of Directors for the Research Data Alliance's H2020-funded EU support activities, and she chairs the ALLEA E-Humanities Working Group.

Previously, Dr Harrower was the DRI's Manager of Education and Outreach, where she initiated and delivered a broad education and training programme in digital preservation and related areas -- including digital humanities, digital archiving, digital curation, and linked data.

Prior to her appointment at the DRI, Dr Harrower was a theatre and film scholar, specialising in Irish identity, politics, and historiography, as seen through the critical lens of contemporary Irish theatre and film. Before moving to Ireland to take up an appointment at Trinity College Dublin on an IRCHSS-funded Irish theatre research project, she was an Assistant Professor of Drama at Queen’s University (Canada), and a lecturer in theatre, film, and Celtic Studies at the University of Toronto. Dr. Harrower has a PhD in Drama from the University of Toronto and an MA in Political Science from York University.