Irish Studies Faculty and Staff

Keri Walsh
Director/Associate Professor of English
Keri Walsh specializes in Irish modernist literature, film, theatre, and expatriate cultures. She is the editor of The Letters of Sylvia Beach (Columbia UP, 2010), which details the life and work of Sylvia Beach, the first publisher of James Joyce’s Ulysses and the owner of the Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris. Walsh is also the editor of Joyce’s Dubliners (Broadview Press, 2016) and Exiles (Oxford World's Classics, 2020) and the co-editor of the Fordham-based journal Joyce Studies Annual. Her articles have appeared in PMLA, Critical Inquiry, Modernism/modernity, and Eire-Ireland and her book, Women, Method Acting, and the Hollywood Film (Routledge, 2021) received the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Film Fellow award in 2018.

Walsh received her PhD in English from Princeton University. She also holds an MPhil from the University of Oxford, an MA from Queen’s University (Canada), and a BA from the University of Saskatchewan.

Associated Faculty

Christopher Maginn
Former Director/Associate Professor of History
Christopher Maginn holds a PhD in history and a Diploma in Irish from the National University of Ireland, Galway where he trained as a Tudor specialist under the supervision of Professor Steven Ellis. His first book ‘Civilizing’ Gaelic Leinster: The Extension of Tudor Rule in the O’Byrne and O’Toole Lordships (2005) was awarded the Irish Historical Research prize in 2005 for the most influential historical work written on Irish history in the previous two years. Subsequent books include: William Cecil, Ireland, and the Tudor state (Oxford 2012) and The Tudor Discovery of Ireland (Dublin, 2015).

Professor Maginn offers courses on the history of Ireland from earliest times to the present. He is a past Director of Fordham's Institute of Irish Studies and is presently Chair of the History Department.

Angela Gina O'Donnell
Associate Director, Curran Center for American Catholic Studies/Professor of English
O’Donnell was educated at the Pennsylvania State University and she earned her M.A. and PhD in English Language & Literature from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has written on Irish and Irish-American writers, including Seamus Heaney, Teresa Deevy, Conor McPherson, Micheal O’Siadhail, Alice McDermott, and Flannery O’Connor, among others. O’Donnell is also a poet whose work has been influenced by Irish and Irish-American writers she admires, including Heaney, Boland, Yeats, and Michael Donaghy. She teaches courses in Irish and Irish-American writers, exploring Irish literature & culture through the lens of Catholicism.

Thomas O'Donnell
Associate Professor of English and Medieval Studies
Dr. O'Donnell's research focuses on multilingualism, contact zones, and monastic literary culture in northwest Europe during the Middle Ages, and he was for several years the Co-Director of Fordham's Program in Comparative Literature. He has written extensively on topics ranging from Old English and Old French poetry to twenty-first-century music. For Irish Studies, he teaches courses on early Irish literature and culture in the wider medieval world, looking at the Letters of St Patrick, saints' lives, mythic sea-voyages, the Fenian Cycle, and Táin Bó Cúailnge. Dr. O'Donnell is also active in the Irish-language speaking community in New York City.