Monday, 8th of Feb, 2021

Bryan A. Stevenson

Bryan Stevenson is a widely acclaimed public interest lawyer who has dedicated his career to helping the poor, the incarcerated, and the condemned.

He is the founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative, a human rights organization in Montgomery, Alabama.

Mr. Stevenson has initiated major new anti-poverty and anti-discrimination efforts that challenge inequality in America. He led the creation of two highly acclaimed cultural sites which opened in 2018: the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. He is also a Professor of Law at the New York University School of Law.

Abbreviated version from the EJI website © Equal Justice Initiative 2021.

Dr. Amanullah De Sondy

Dr. Amanullah De Sondy is Head of the Study of Religions, Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Islam and Chair of the Race Equality Forum at University College Cork, Ireland

Niall Burgess

Niall Burgess is the Secretary General of Ireland and, under the political direction of the Minister for Foreign Affairs Simon Coveney T.D., the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade is managed by Mr Burgess.

Find more information on the DFA’s website or here.

Dr. Patricia J. Ferreira

Patricia J. Ferreira, Ph.D. has been a Frederick Douglass scholar for nearly thirty years, publishing and speaking in a variety of venues. She is particularly interested in his relationship with members of the Jennings family in Cork, a renowned vinegar and soda water manufacturer in the city. Ferreira has recently completed a book-length manuscript on Isabel Jennings with whom Douglass shared a life-long friendship. She is a Professor of English at Vermont's Norwich University, where her courses focus on literature through a cultural, racial, and ethnic lens.

Dr. Jack Kaufman-McKivigan

John R. McKivigan is the Mary O'Brien Gibson Professor of History at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. He joined the Frederick Douglass Papers in 1979 and has been its editor since 1994. McKivigan is the author of thirty books, including Forgotten Firebrand: James Redpath and the Making of Nineteenth-Century America (2008) and Frederick Douglass in Britain and Ireland. (2021), with Hannah-Rose Murray. Find out more about Dr Kaufman-McKivigan here.

Dr. Leigh Fought

Dr. Leigh Fought is an associate professor of history at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, NY, and the author of Women in the World of Frederick Douglass (Oxford University Press, 2017), which won the 2018 Herbert Lehman Prize for Scholarship in New York History and the Society of Historians of the Early American Republic’s 2018 Mary Kelly Prize. Her previous work includes Southern Womanhood and Slavery: A Biography of Louisa McCord (University of Missouri Press, 2003). She is working on a short biography of Sally Hemings for classroom use (Routledge Press) and a study of nostalgia and the Little House on the Prairie.

Dr. Bill Rolston

Bill Rolston is emeritus professor of Sociology at Ulster University and former head of the Transitional Justice Institute at Ulster. He has researched and written on a wide range of topics over his career, from unemployment in West Belfast to murals in Gaza. In 2002 he co-authored with Michael Shannon Encounters: How Racism Came to Ireland.

Dr. Peter O'Neill

Dr Peter D. O'Neill is an Associate Professor in the Comparative Literature Department at the University of Georgia, where he has served as a Research Fellow at UGA’s Willson Center for Humanities and Arts and as a Lilly Teaching Fellow. With David Lloyd, he co-edited the essay collection, The Black and Green Atlantic: Crosscurrents of the African and Irish Diasporas, (Palgrave Macmillan; 2009), while a paperback edition of his award-winning book, Famine Irish and the American Racial State, was published by Routledge in 2019. Find out more information on Peter’s website.

Sandrine Ndahiro

Sandrine Ndahiro is an English Ph.D. student in the University of Limerick. Sandrine’s research centres on third generation African writers, such as Afrofuturists, who have emerged during the era of late liberalism and who have introduced multiple and nuanced perspectives for reflecting on African lives and aspirations. She recently co-produced a documentary entitled Unsilencing Black Voices which details personal stories and accounts by members of the black community in Ireland. Sandrine’s work now highlights the lived experiences of the Black and Irish community with her recent publication of her essay ‘Irishness does not mean whiteness.’

John Nutekpor

John Nutekpor is a musician, educator and festival curator with over twenty years of experience teaching in primary, secondary and tertiary education in Ghana and internationally. His in-depth knowledge of Ghanaian traditional music and dance has led to teaching and presenting invitations across Europe and North America. He holds an MA in Festive Arts from the University of Limerick and is a regular guest tutor at the Irish World Academy. He is presently conducting doctoral research around Ghanaian-Irish cultural dialogue, through music and dance pedagogy, curation and performance, and has recently been awarded a substantial grant by the Department of Justice and Equality for an integration project based on his research.John Nutekpor is a musician, educator and festival curator with over twenty years of experience teaching in primary, secondary and tertiary education in Ghana and internationally. His in-depth knowledge of Ghanaian traditional music and dance has led to teaching and presenting invitations across Europe and North America. He holds an MA in Festive Arts from the University of Limerick and is a regular guest tutor at the Irish World Academy. He is presently conducting doctoral research around Ghanaian-Irish cultural dialogue, through music and dance pedagogy, curation and performance, and has recently been awarded a substantial grant by the Department of Justice and Equality for an integration project based on his research.

Sir Geoff Palmer

Sir Geoff Palmer was born in Jamaica and lives in Scotland. He came to London as an immigrant in 1955. After various difficulties, he worked and attended evening classes to improve his qualifications. In 1989, he became the first black professor in Scotland. Sir Geoff is Professor Emeritus in the School of Life Sciences at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland, and a human rights activist. Sir Geoff is the author of many scientific papers and has published books on grain science and the history of Slavery in the West Indies. He serves on the Boards of various charitable organizations. He is the Freeman of Midlothian and the Honorary Consul for Jamaica in Scotland. Professor Palmer was awarded the OBE in 2003 and a Knighthood in 2014 for his contributions to science, charity and human rights.

Timi Ogunyemi

Timi Ogunyemi is an Irish curator, videographer, multi-award winning photographer and 'retired' blogger with ‘Picture This Dublin’. Born in Lagos, Made in Dublin. In a career spanning Retail Management, Professional Consultancy and Creative Management, Timi has worked on concepting and implementing award winning campaigns with both local and global brands. He is passionate about using Social platforms to make a positive impact on society.

Mark Durkan

Mark Durkan, Board Member, John & Pat Hume Foundation for Peaceful Change & Reconciliation

Durkan is former deputy First Minister, MP, MLA and Leader of the Social Democratic & Labour Party, negotiator for Good Friday Agreement, and assistant to John Hume (1984-'98). As an MP, Durkan was an officer of the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Human Rights and a founder member and officer of APPG on Human Trafficking and Modern Slavery. On the Bill Committee for the Modern Slavery Act, he tabled and pushed amendments working closely with Anti-Slavery International - the world's oldest anti-slavery organisation - founded by Daniel O'Connell.

Photo credit: Andrew Muir

Dr. Nilgün Anadolu-Okur

Dr. Nilgün Anadolu-Okur is the Presidential Professor of Africology and African American Studies and the director of DAAAS undergraduate program at Temple University’s College of Liberal Arts. She holds an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in African American and American Studies. She is the chairperson of Faculty Senate Status of Women committee, and serves as affiliated faculty at Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program at Temple University. As Pennsylvania Humanities Council (PHC) Commonwealth speaker she toured Pennsylvania and lectured on Underground Railroad and Black Abolitionists. She is the co-founder of the “Annual Underground Railroad Conference at Temple University,” since 2004. Her articles are published in peer-reviewed journals including Journal of Black Studies, Gender Issues, Human and Society. Her research and publications are based upon Africology and Afrocentricity, African American history, literary discourse analysis, women’s rights, and motherhood in antiquity. Her publications include the following volumes; Dismantling Slavery: Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison and the Formation of the Abolitionist Discourse, 1841-1851; Women, Islam, and Globalization in the 21st Century; Contemporary African American Theater: Afrocentricity in the Works of Larry Neal, Amiri Baraka, and Charles Fuller, and Essays Interpreting the Novels of Orhan Pamuk.

Dr. James S. Finley

Dr. James S. Finley is Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University - San Antonio, where he teaches classes on early and nineteenth-century American literature and English pedagogy. His publications include the edited collection Henry David Thoreau in Context (2017) and multiple essays on nineteenth-century American abolitionism. He is currently at work on a book, tentatively titled Free Soil Abolition: Slavery, Race, and Ecology in Antebellum America.

Mamobo Ogoro

Mamobo Ogoro is a Social Psychology PhD candidate at the University of Limerick and Arts Practitioner. Trained as a social psychologist and now applying her knowledge into the multi-disciplinary field of applied linguistics and social psychology, Mamobo’s research focuses on multicultural/ bicultural identities and linguistics portrayals of ‘othering’ in Irish society & media. Fueled by both her personal experience as an Afro-Irish person growing up in Ireland and her previous work on prejudice, racism, and dual cultural identity, Mamobo’s work now highlights the media and social representations of multicultural people in Ireland. This is evident in her recent manuscript that has been submitted for publication ‘The discursive representations of Ellie Kisyombe during the 2019 Irish local elections’ (Ogoro, Moriarty & Minescu, 2020); and her current work on social representations of second-generation migrants in Ireland. Also, as the founder Gorm TV, an online web show and creative network that dissects the social issues of Ireland’s newfound multicultural Millennial and Gen Z generations.

Dr. Anthea Butler

Anthea Butler is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. Her book Women in the Church of God in Christ: Making A Sanctified World, is published by The University of North Carolina Press. Her new book White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America, is out March 22 on Ferris and Ferris, a division of UNC Press. Professor Butler is a sought after media commentator on Catholicism, religion, politics and gender

Kenneth B. Morris Jr.

Kenneth B. Morris Jr is the Co-Founder & President, Frederick Douglass Family Initiatives. He descends from two of the most influential names in American history: he is the great-great-great-grandson of Frederick Douglass and the great-great-grandson of Booker T. Washington. His mother, Nettie Washington Douglass, is the daughter of Nettie Hancock Washington (granddaughter of Booker T. Washington) and Dr. Frederick Douglass III (great-grandson of Frederick Douglass). Ken’s life until the year 2007 could be described as distinguished yet decisively disengaged from his lineage until Providence called. Ken continues his family’s legacy of anti-slavery and educational work as co-founder and president of the Rochester, NY-based nonprofit Frederick Douglass Family Initiatives (FDFI). His career and life path are driven by a clear focus on FDFI’s mission“[to] Build Strong Children and to end systems of exploitation and oppression.“ He could not have predicted that one day he would so fully embrace and be defined by the characteristics that so closely defined his famous ancestors. Prior to co-founding FDFI, Ken was a partner at C&A Marketing, a marketing and entertainment firm partnership, recognized as a leader in the field of corporate meetings, incentive travel, and the development of customized marketing programs. He has been a member of the board of directors for Kaleidoscope Arts Factory, a nonprofit performing arts organization, the Booker T. Washington Family Committee, and the Dean’s Advisory Committee at the University of La Verne. Ken sits on the board of directors for the Frederick Douglass Ireland Project, he serves as board president at The Young Americans performing arts organization, and he is a former ambassador for the nonprofit organization Human Rights First. In November 2017, Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi named him to the Frederick Douglass Bicentennial Commission, where he served as Commission Chair. Ken received a Bachelor of Arts Religion degree from the Ecumenical Center for Black Church Studies at the University of La Verne. He received an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from the University of La Verne January 2012. He strongly believes, as did Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington, that education is the pathway to freedom.

Dr. Adrian Mulligan

Dr. Adrian Mulligan is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Geography at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, USA. In 1996, he was awarded an MPhil in Geography at University College Cork, and he subsequently earned his PhD from the University of Arizona. His research and teaching focus on the role that places play in both producing but also countering norms of nationalism, race, gender and sexuality. His publications cover a broad array of topics, for example researching Irish abolitionism and Frederick Douglass’s lecture tour, uncovering the role of the Ladies’ Land League in the Irish Land War, considering sexuality in American St. Patrick’s Day Parades, and exploring citizenship and multiculturalism in postcolonial modern Ireland,. You can find out more about his research here. His 2016 publication, ‘As a Lever Gains Power by its Distance from the Fulcrum’: Tracing Frederick Douglass in the Irish Atlantic World can also be downloaded here.

Dr. Patricia J. Ferreira

Dr. Paul Giles

Dr. Paul Giles is Challis Professor of English at the University of Sydney, Australia. He is the author of many books discussing cultural legacies of religion and transnational circulations of English, American and Australian literature. He previously wrote on Douglass in Virtual Americas: Transnational Fictions and the Transatlantic Imaginary (Duke UP, 2002). He is currently serving as president of the International Association of University Professors of English and completing a trilogy of books on cultural representations of time, with the second volume, The Planetary Clock: Antipodean Time and Spherical Postmodern Fictions, scheduled for publication by OUP on 25 February.

Dr. Alasdair Pettinger

Dr. Alasdair Pettinger is the editor of Always Elsewhere: Travels of the Black Atlantic (1998), and has published a number of essays reflecting his (overlapping) interests in travel literature, the cultures of slavery and abolitionism, and representations of Haiti. His latest books are Frederick Douglass and Scotland, 1846 (Edinburgh University Press, 2018) and (co-edited with Tim Youngs), The Routledge Research Companion to Travel Writing (Routledge, 2019). Find out more.

Catherine Osikoya

Catherine Osikoya is a 5th year Architecture student in the University of Limerick. Her Thesis research is about finding the correlation between colonialism and cultural identity, and how in turn that impacts environments in the context of Nigeria. Unsilencing Black Voices, is a documentary in which she Co-produced, was formed as a response to the injustices that happened in relation to the Black Lives Matter Movement in the US and how we too face similar albeit, different experiences in Ireland.

Maryse Semututsi-Inema

Maryse Semututsi-Inema is a first year master’s in research at LIT. She was born in Tanzania, grew up in Belgium and she is living in Limerick, Ireland for the past 6 years. She is focusing on mental health awareness for young adults in third level education as well speak out to all silent students.

Lylian Fotabong

Lylian Fotabong is an African-Irish PhD researcher. Some years ago, a non-native Irish phoned her to say they were shy and afraid but wanted to tell their own side of the story following a newspaper article that they said was one-sided and prejudiced. She said to them: “Would you like me to interview you on the phone (where no one will see you) during my radio programme?” They were pleased and she interviewed them the next day. That is one reason she is a trained journalist with experiences in local, national, and international media, and now studying about linguistics choices that the media employ in covering immigrant stories.

Tuesday, 9th of Feb, 2021

Roger Guenveur Smith

Roger Guenveur Smith adapted his Obie award-winning solo performance of A HUEY P. NEWTON STORY into a Peabody Award- winning telefilm, currently streaming on Hulu. His Bessie Award-winning RODNEY KING is on Netflix. Roger has also devised theatrical studies of Frederick Douglass and Christopher Columbus, Bob Marley and Jimi Hendrix, iconoclast artists Jean-Michel Basquiat, Simon Rodia, and Charles White, and baseball greats Juan Marichal and John Roseboro.

His work on screen includes projects inspired by Malcolm X, Thurgood Marshall, Rosa Parks, Nat Turner, and Madame CJ Walker.

Dr Caroline Schroeter

Caroline is the lead project coordinator of #DouglassWeek. In 2019, she was awarded a PhD in American Studies and Film at University College Cork (UCC) and has been teaching at UCC since 2015. In the last 15 years, she has dedicated her research and teaching to engaging students with the cinematic representation of slavery, racism and stereotyping, and making North American slavery on page and on screen accessible, visible and understandable for students. Her work also explores the foundations of modern-day, systemic racism, following the political, cultural and social developments and civil rights movements and she has been involved in a variety of diversity and inclusion efforts in Ireland and abroad, such as the Universities Studying Slavery project, the Free The Slaves initiative or Students Ending Slavery.

Read more about her research in Southern History on Screen: Race and Rights, 1976-2016 and you can find out more about her work on her website.

Rex Daugherty

Rex is a DC based theatre artist and currently serves as the Producing Theatre Artistic Director of Solas Nua. Originally from Oklahoma City, both of his parents grew up on farms and taught him the value of hard work and good company. Rex has made the DC area his home for the past thirteen years, and he shares his life with his wife, Lee, and son, Beckett. Beckett is three years old and loves to crash any and all Zoom meetings.

During his 5 years as artistic director of Solas Nua’s theatre programming, Rex has garnered international acclaim for his productions, earned multiple Helen Hayes Awards and nominations, and provided the company with steady artistic and financial growth. The Washington Post said that Rex“is hope for Solas Nua to re-plant its imaginative flag forcefully on this city’s theatre map” and Charles Isherwood of The New York Times praised him as, “sheer energy...exciting performances...with Mr. Daugherty in particular finding all sorts of robust comedy.” His work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, on the cover of American Theatre Magazine, The Irish Times and aired on RTE - Irish TV. Recently, his one-man show The Smuggler was listed by The New York Times as one of the best theatre productions of 2019, nationwide. Rex has produced the top three highest grossing shows in the company’s 15 year history, and looks forward to ensuring a vibrant future for Solas Nua. Find out more about Rex.

Brenda Malone

Brenda Malone, historian and museum professional, is currently the Curator of Military History, Arms and Armour, Flags, Banners and Transport at the National Museum of Ireland where she has worked since 2000, curating both Historical and Folklife collections. Her particular areas of interest include the development of the idea of ‘nation’, and how this is collected and portrayed in National Museums. She has curated many of the NMI’s history exhibitions over the decade of centenaries, most recently The Irish Wars 1919-1923 in the main Soldiers and Chiefs exhibition. She is also the author of The Cricket Bat that Died for Ireland, a blog that tells the often complex stories behind the historical objects collected by the National Museum. She established the Contemporary History collection of the National Museum in 2018 through the collecting of recent history such as the Marriage Equality and Repeal the 8th referenda, the Industrial School System and the Magdalene Laundry System, and is interested in how the collections can reflect current Irish society in a meaningful way and provide opportunities for discussion of our difficult histories, civil rights and civil wrongs. Find out more.

MECPATHS

Founded in 2013, MECPATHS is the only non-profit organisation in Ireland which works in direct partnership with the Hospitality Industry and Services Sectors to prevent Child Trafficking and to enhance existing protective measures. We work with Hotel Groups, Hospitality Training Colleges, Universities and Private Industries to raise awareness and help to protect children from exploitation. More information can be found here.

Ann Mara is a graduate of Trinity College Dublin and Development Studies Centre, Kimmage Manor. With a qualified background in Education, Programme Management, and International development, Ann has worked overseas for the last two decades in a number of community-development capacities including the delivery of education and strategic training programmes in Sub-Saharan Africa and in the co-founding of justice initiatives in The USA. Her passion for education and advocacy supports MECPATHS in its efforts to reach national audiences.

JP O’ Sullivan joined MECPATHS in 2017 as a graduate of UCC with a qualified background in Social Work and experience of programme design, development and implementation in Adult Mental Health Services and eight years working in International Development with a special interest in advocacy, child protection and anti-trafficking. JP continues to engage with non-profit strategic planning for child-focused agencies in the southern hemisphere.

Paul Oakley Stovall

Paul Oakley Stovall is a critically-acclaimed writer and actor. He currently plays George Washington in the national tour of "Hamilton: An American Musical".

Kristin Leary

Kristin is a senior advisor to the Frederick Douglass Family Initiatives and a founder of the Frederick Douglass Ireland Project. An attorney based in Washington, DC, she has extensive experience working with the U.S. government and nonprofit groups, labor unions, and policy organizations and building diverse coalitions around legislative and policy issues. She began her career on the staff of the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy and has worked on many national political campaigns. Kristin is a former vice-chair of the board of the Washington Ireland Program, a graduate of Boston College and the Catholic University School of Law.

Dr. Hannah-Rose Murray

Dr. Hannah-Rose Murray received a Ph.D. from the University of Nottingham and is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on the recovery of African American oratorical, literary and visual testimony in Britain during the nineteenth century. Her first book, Advocates of Freedom: African American Transatlantic Abolitionism in the British Isles was published in 2020 by Cambridge University Press, and her accompanying website, attempts to map as many Black activist speaking locations across Britain and Ireland. She has organized numerous community events including talks, primary and secondary school workshops, heritage plaques, performances, podcasts, plays, exhibitions and walking tours on both sides of the Atlantic. Her second book, co-authored with John Kaufman-McKivigan, focuses on Frederick Douglass in Britain and Ireland 1845-1895.

Danielle O’Donovan

Dr Danielle O'Donovan is the Programme Manager of Nano Nagle Place, a 3.5 acre heritage site comprising Georgian convent buildings and Victorian schools and chapel, set in extensive walled gardens. The on-site museum tells the story of Nano Nagle, an educationalist who founded schools during the penal era and established the Presentation Sisters. The aim of the museum is to tell the story of the past while continuing the fight for social justice in the present. Danielle's research interests span architectural history and creative education.

Ashlie Bryant

Ashlie Bryant is an innovator, leader, social entrepreneur and advocate for children around the globe. She believes in the power of the human spirit and the ability for anyone to thrive and achieve.

In 2010, Ashlie founded 3Strands Global Foundation in response to a trafficking incident in her small suburb. Over the past ten years, she has led the develop of a global anti-trafficking training and curriculum now live in four states and several countries. To date, the program has reached over 60,000 adults and more than 500,000 youth. Ashlie expanded 3Strands programming to include a direct services program called Employ + Empower. This program that has placed over 300 survivors and at-risk youth in sustainable jobs in the last four years.

Kenneth B. Morris Jr.

Hannah Crowdy

Hannah Crowdy is the Head of Curatorial at National Museums NI, Northern Ireland’s foremost cultural and heritage museum group. With a background in social history curation and collections interpretation, she has been in her current role since 2017, and takes a leading role in the organisation’s work on contested histories, the legacy of the past and decolonisation. She is a member of the Ethics Committee for the UK Museums Association.

Prof. Christine Kinealy

Christine Kinealy completed her PhD at Trinity College in Dublin. She has published extensively on modern Ireland, with a focus on the Great Hunger and on the Abolition movement. Christine’s award-winning publications include, This Great Calamity, The Great Famine in Ireland, and a graphic novel based on the experiences of children during the Great Hunger, entitled, ‘The Bad Times’. During the last decade, her research has explored the experiences of abolitionists who visited Ireland in the 19th century, leading to the publication, Frederick Douglass and Ireland-- In his own Words, and then to her latest book, Black Abolitionists in Ireland.

Christine moved to the United States in 2007 to develop the Irish Studies Graduate program at Drew University. In 2013, she was appointed the founding Director of Ireland’s Great Hunger Institute at Quinnipiac University. Through a vibrant series of conferences, exhibitions, publications and lectures, the Institute provides a forum for understanding the perennial problems of hunger, food security and economic inequalities in society, both historically and today.

Since 2013, Christine has been named one of the top 100 educators in Irish America. In 2014, she was inducted into the Irish America Hall of Fame and named one of the most influential women in Irish America. In 2017, Christine received an Emmy Award for her contribution to the documentary, “The Great Hunger and the Irish Diaspora.” In 2018, she was named a Belfast International Homecoming Ambassador, in recognition of her continuing close ties with the city where she lived between 1987 and 1992.

Simon O’Connor

Simon O’Connor is the Director of MoLI - the Museum of Literature Ireland, a collaboration between University College Dublin and the National Library of Ireland. The museum is housed in the original home of UCD, Newman house, a spectacular collection of period buildings right in the middle of Dublin City Centre. Simon is the first Director of the museum, overseeing the creation of a major contribution to the cultural landscape, as well as its organisational and curatorial structures. A composer by training, Simon O'Connor was the founding curator of the Little Museum of Dublin, building the museum from scratch in 2011 and managing its highly ambitious exhibition programme, winning many national and international awards along the way. He has worked across the arts and creative sector, and continues to be active as a composer.

You can find out more about him, his work and MOLI here.

Wednesday, 10th of Feb, 2021

Paul Oakley Stovall

Paul Oakley Stovall is a critically-acclaimed writer and actor. He currently plays George Washington in the national tour of "Hamilton: An American Musical".

While performing on tour, his KernoForto Productions (KFP) has completed three projects. The first, a short film entitled BUFFALO, has been selected to L’Age D’Or Arthouse Film Festival, Kaleidoscope LGBTQ Film Festival, Cine-Maniacs in Germany, and is a nominee for the Pigeon D’Or in Kolkata. It has also recently been selected to Prague, Madrid, Montreal and aGLIFF. The second, a web series pilot called COLUMBUS, just won best web series at the Big Apple Film Festival in NYC, and scored five awards at the LA Independent Shorts, including Best Sci-Fi, Best Thriller and Best Original Story. It has also been selected to Montreal. Ep102 is in post production. Other projects in the hopper include FATHERS AND SONS, a messy dramedy about interracial intersectional LGBTQ parenting in a post Obama era; ADVANCE, a political thriller; THREE STORIES HIGH, where Twilight Zone and Black Mirror copulate with Dear White People; THE TRANSMANAUT CHRONICLES, four black teenage best friends on an epic road trip set in 1970s California; and two comedies, GOOD TIMES TALENT and INCOGNEGRO, about a black talent agency, and a black detective agency, respectively. (some treatments, pitch decks, and pilot scripts available) Mr. Stovall was also a staff writer for season 4 on the STARZ network hit comedy Survivor’s Remorse (Mike O’Malley - showrunner, Ali Leroi - EP) starring NAACP award recipient Tichina Arnold. As a playwright he is a Steinberg, Jeff, and GLAAD award nominee for his play Immediate Family, which has been directed by Phylicia Rashad at Goodman and Mark Taper Forum. His musical CLEAR was chosen for the Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights/ Music Theatre Conference and subsequently his play THE HUNTED (co-written with Evan Linder) was a 2017 Finalist.

As an actor, he has appeared off-Broadway at Second Stage in Tony winner Mary Zimmerman’s Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci and at Lincoln Center in the world premiere of Dessa Rose directed by Graciela Daniele. Other NYC work includes .22 Caliber Mouth at Ohio Theatre directed by Tony winner Diane Paulus, and assistant director to Phylicia Rashad for the Signature Theatre production of Pulitzer Prize winner Stephen Adly Guirgis’ Our Lady of 121st Street. Regionally, Mr. Stovall has appeared in Chicago at Steppenwolf in the world premiere of The Qualms by Tony winner Bruce Norris and directed by Tony winner Pam McKinnon.

Lesley Roy

Lesley Roy is a songwriter from Balbriggan. Based in Manhattan, Lesley has written for songwriters like Katy Perry and was selected as Ireland's entry for the Eurovision Song Contest for 2020 and 2021 to an expected television audience of 182 million.

Sarah McCreedy

Sarah is a Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholar based in the School of English at University College Cork, where she teaches a number of undergraduate modules in 19th-21st century American literature. Her thesis explores the resurgence of American literary naturalism in contemporary American fiction. She is also an editor for the peer-reviewed postgraduate journal, Aigne, as well as an early career representative for the Irish Association for American Studies.

Brendan Breslin

Brendan is the Head of RIAM Connect & Outreach at the Royal Irish Academy of Music in Dublin. You can find out more information about Brenda here or by going to the Royal Irish Academy of Music (RIAM) website or going to Brendan’s website.

Joy-Tendai Kangere

Joy-Tendai Kangere is Zimbabwean born, Irish citizen and a proud mother to two. She is the co-founder of Rooted in Africa-Ireland Network (@riainetwork), a lifelong learning advocate, holds Bachelor of Civil Law degree from UCD Sutherland School of Law & a recipient of the Denham Fellowship. She is an advocate for equality for women, girls, and ethnic minorities. Her deep commitment to social justice and racial equity is what motivates her work. In addition, Joy-Tendai is a Board Member of AONTAS (adult learning charity) and the Ethnic Minorities department at Victims Alliance.

Diane Ihirwe

Diane Ihirwe is an African Irish social worker, speaker, writer, and social justice seeker. She is a graduate of master’s in social work from Trinity College and holds an undergraduate degree in Social Care from TU Dublin. Diane speaks about racism from everyday life, as well as systemic and structural racism and its impact. She advocates for the abolition of the Direct Provision System. She travelled to the United Nations (UN) in Geneva in December 2019 to advocate on behalf of Asylum Seekers on the Committee of Eradicating Racial Discrimination (CERD).

Ashley Makombe Chadamoyo is a writer/journalist and is the Co-Founder and Head of the Writers Department for The GALPAL Collective; an arts and media publication dedicated to the creation and celebration of art by young queer folk, women, and people of colour. She also has a heavy background in the arts, having past worked with NOISE Flicks film festival Her International Film festival, Tallaght Community Arts, Carousel Theatre School and Tallaght Young Filmmakers. Ashley is currently a 2nd-year journalism student in the Technological University Dublin.

Nikhil Saboo

Nikhil Saboo is a singer and dancer based in New York CIty. He is currently juggling six roles in the 1st National Tour of HAMILTON: An American Musical by Lin Manuel Miranda and was a part of the original Broadway cast of Mean Girls: The Musical written by Tina Fey.

Outside of performing, Nikhil loves to uplift, engage, and empower community and kids within the arts. He is a proud faculty member of Broadway For All where the mission is to transform the arts to emulate the diversity of America and “shape a new generation of artists, leaders, and advocates who are impassioned to create inclusive work for all.” He also was a camera operator and cinematographer for the Amazon Prime show The Vintage Voyageur.

Eimear Noone

Eimear Noone is a classical conductor based between Los Angeles and Ireland. In 2020, Eimear became the first female conductor at the Academy Awards.

Dónal Kearney

Dónal Kearney is co-founder of the Irish Institute of Music and Song. After reading Law at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, he completed a Master’s (LL.M.) at the Irish Centre for Human Rights and secured a position as human rights researcher at the United Nations. Since then, Dónal has pursued a career in music as a performer and producer. As a soloist, he has performed in sixteen countries across three continents and has recorded internationally with World of Warcraft in California and Nintendo in Tokyo. Dónal has worked as a vocal coach with National Youth Choirs of Northern Ireland, National Youth Choirs of Great Britain, and he trained with Musicians Without Borders in 2015. He is a sought-after workshop facilitator and advocate of Irish folk song. For his full portfolio of creative projects, visit www.donal-kearney.com.

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Michael T. Dawson

Michael T. Dawson is co-founder of the Irish Institute of Music and Song. Michael is a Fulbright Scholar and recently returned from Los Angeles where he studied for a Doctoral degree in Choral Music at the University of Southern California. Prior to moving to the U.S., he worked at the National University of Ireland Maynooth where he led the choir to win several International competitions including the "Choir of the World" title at the Llangollen Eisteddfod. He has adjudicated choral competitions nationally and internationally and is regularly invited to provide clinics to groups visiting Ireland. For a full biography, visit www.michaeltdawson.com

Eva Kimpwene

Eva Kimpwene is a Fashion Design Graduate based in Limerick City. Growing up in Mayo and coming from a Congolese background, Eva’s work focuses on the fusion of her western culture infused with her Congolese culture. Her Graduate collection ‘KIMPWENE’ is a cultural fusion of two sides of her identity that she resonates with Irish and Congolese. Eva continues to make her cultural DNA the focus of her work and has featured in projects such as Unsilencing Black Voices. It is through her passion for creating and making that she narrates her story of being a young, black women in 2021.

Ola Majekodunmi

Ola Majekodunmi was born in Lagos, Nigeria and raised in Dublin, Ireland. She is a radio presenter, Gaelgeoir, filmmaker and co-founder of Beyond Representation. She has grown up in Dublin, Ireland since she was 7 months old and has lived there her whole life. She found a passion for the Irish language at a young age as she went to all-Irish schools. She first became a radio presenter with Raidió na Life 106.4FM 6 years ago, presenting the show ‘Seinnliosta an tSathairn’ and then more recently presenting the popular African Irish show, ‘Afra-Éire’. She often contributes on other radio stations’ shows such as on RTÉ Raidió na Gaeltachta, RTÉ 2FM, RTÉ 2XM, BBC Radio Ulster, BBC Radio Foyle, RTÉ Radio 1 and more on different topics to do with politics, current affairs, and race. She is also a contributor to the very popular Motherfoclóir podcast, which explores different topics regarding the Irish language in a fun, witty way.

Also part of Wednesday’s programme but mentioned above or elsewhere:

Kenneth B. Morris Jr.
Sandrine Ndahiro
Catherine Osikoya
Charles Randolph Wright

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Don Maple

Don Maple is a Canadian-Irish artist currently based in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The music of Don Maple is filled with open and honest lyricism that has gained him a cult following in the UK & Ireland due to his ability to discuss difficult and relatable topics especially around mental health. Don also runs a music collective called Year Spaceship which works with artists to help them in a variety of different ways. The members of Year Spaceship host a music & entertainment podcast called ‘Sick Set Bro’ that mainly focuses on trying to promote local musicians across the UK.

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Stevie G

Stevie G is an Irish DJ who works at Cork’s RedFM. He’s a regular feature at music and arts festivals throughout the country. He is one of Ireland’s best known DJs and he is regarded as a pioneer when it comes to spreading music such as hip-hop, soul and Afro-beats in Ireland. He is also a community activist and he has worked at the Cork Migrant Centre in Nano Nagle Place for nearly 4 years now, where he currently spearheads a number of music and arts projects, working with teenagers from Direct Provision and the greater migrant community of Cork.

J. Griffith Rollefson

J. Griffith Rollefson is Professor of Music at University College Cork, National University of Ireland and has served on the faculties of music at the University of Cambridge and at the University of California, Berkeley, where he also served as UC Chancellor’s Public Scholar. Rollefson is Principle Investigator of the ERC research initiative CIPHER: Hip Hop Interpellation, which is developing new digital/ethnographic methods to map hip hop knowledge flows on six continents (2019-2024). He is founding co-editor (with University of Cape Town’s Adam Haupt) of the journal Global Hip Hop Studies. His first book, Flip the Script: European Hip Hop and the Politics of Postcoloniality (University of Chicago Press, 2017), won the Society for Ethnomusicology’s 2019 Ruth Stone Book Award and his second book, Critical Excess: Watch the Throne and the New Gilded Age, about Jay-Z, Kanye, Trump and the end of capitalism launches in June 2021 from University of Michigan Press. For more information on Griff’s work, please visit https://europeanhiphop.org/ and to get involved in CIPHER, check out https://globalcipher.org/ and follow @GlobalCipher.

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Marcus Hummon

It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Vicky Musitongo

Vicky Musitongo (also known as Vicky Inspires) is a Social Media Influencer and a Fashion/Editorial model. She is also a podcast host and founder of ‘Unspoken Truths’ series. Vicky is a Diversity and Inclusion Advocate who is vocal about issues faced by black people. She is involved in women empowerment initiatives and as a domestic violence survivor herself, she uses her platform to advocate for women's rights. Vicky is the Head of Youth, Rooted in Africa Network (RIAINETWORK) and a mother of two.

Emer O’Neill

Emer O’Neill is a mother of two Kyan 6 and Sunny Rae is 7 months old. She was born and raised in Ireland and is Irish/Nigerian. Emer has a BA in Education and a master’s degree in leadership and Administration. She teaches Physical Education in a secondary school in Bray and coaches Basketball. In 2005 she received a scholarship to play basketball in the USA prior to which she represented Ireland for basketball from the age of 13. Emer is also a plus size model and was the winner of the SimplyBe Plus Size Modelling Competition in 2014. Emer is a huge advocate for promoting positive body image. She is the ambassador for a programme called Free Being Me which is a programme with the Irish Girl Guides to encourage children to love their body and the skin they are in. She has currently been speaking out about BLM and hopes to bring awareness to the lack of diversity in the media, state jobs, positions of leadership and in our education system.

Thursday, 11th of Feb, 2021

Dr Margaret Brehony

Margaret Brehony Is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie/CAROLINE Research Fellow at the Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies, University College Cork. She is currently researching Irish transnational migration and intersections of gender, race and white colonisation in a time of slavery in Cuba. A graduate of NUIG and UCC, she earned a PhD in 2012 with a thesis entitled “Irish Migration to Cuba, 1835-1845: Empire, Ethnicity, Slavery and ‘Free’ Labour.” She is President of the Society for Irish Latin American Studies and co-editor with Nuala Finnegan of Irlanda y Cuba: Historias Entretejidas / Ireland and Cuba: Entangled Histories, Boloña, (Havana: 2019).

More info here.

Dr. Nuala Finnegan

Nuala graduated from NUI Galway with a BA in Irish and Spanish and then undertook an MA by Research at University College Dublin with a thesis on the surrealist prose poetry of acclaimed Spanish poet, Vicente Aleixandre. In 1996 she was awarded a PhD from the University of Glasgow on the notion of the monstrous feminine in the work of Mexican writer, Rosario Castellanos. This was later revised for publication as The Monstrous Feminine in the Writing of Rosario Castellanos (2001). She was appointed as lecturer in Hispanic Studies in UCC in 1999 with responsibility for the direction of the newly established Centre for Mexican Studies. Her previous academic appointments included two years as Head of Spanish at the University of Limerick and four years as lecturer in Spanish and Latin American Studies at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. She is currently Head of the Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies having been Head of the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures from 2013-2016 and Director of the Centre for Mexican Studies at UCC. More info here.

Prof. Lee Jenkins

Prof. Lee M. Jenkins is Professor of English at University College Cork. She is the author of books on Wallace Stevens, Caribbean poetry and D.H. Lawrence, and is the co-editor of 3 Cambridge UP collections on modernist poetry. Lee has published articles on Douglass and Ireland and Douglass in Cork, and contributed a chapter on the topic to Peter O’Neill and David Lloyd’s collection The Black and Green Atlantic. She was involved in the putting up of a plaque in the Imperial Hotel commemorating Douglass’ visit to Cork.

Dr. Hussein Omar

Hussein Omar is Assistant Professor in Modern Global History at University College Dublin. His research examines anticolonial political ideas in the Arabophone world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His monograph The Rule of Strangers: Empire, Islam and the Invention of "politics" in Egypt, 1867-- 1922 is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. At UCD he runs a seminar in Global History, teaches on the MA in Global History and is designing a new BA degree in

Global Studies. He was a co-author of an open letter on'Ethics and Empire' by Oxford academics in 2017 and a contributor to the HEPI report onDecolonising the Curriculum (July, 2020).

Also on Thursday but mentioned about:

Dr. Hannah-Rose Murray,
Dr. Caroline Schroeter
Prof. Christine Kinealy
Sarah McCreedy

Dr. Kerby Miller

Kerby Miller is Curators' Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Missouri. Since earning his Ph.D. in History in 1976 at the University of California, Berkeley, his principal academic interests are modern Irish social history, especially Irish emigration, and the Irish in North America. He has authored or co-authored over three-dozen scholarly articles as well as the prize-winning studies, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (Oxford, 1985), and Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan (Oxford, 2003). More recently he has authored Ireland and Irish America: Culture, Class, and Transatlantic Migration (Dublin, 2008), and coauthored Catholics and Protestants in Eighteenth-Century Ireland: The Irish Religious Censuses of the 1760s (Dublin, 2020 forthcoming). Currently, he is doing research on several Irish migrants to Cuba, one in the early 1800s, the other a century later.

Dr. Robert Levine

Robert S. Levine is Distinguished University Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park. His most recent books are The Lives of Frederick Douglass (Harvard University Press, 2016) and Race, Transnationalism, and Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies (Cambridge University Press, 2018). His new book, The Failed Promise: Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass, and the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson, will be published by W. W. Norton in August 2021. He is the General Editor of The Norton Anthology of American Literature and past winner of Guggenheim and NEH Fellowships.

Dr. Marjorie Stone

Marjorie Stone, McCulloch Professor Emeritus of English, Dalhousie University, is Volume Editor for 3 of 5 volumes in The Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (2010); co-editor of Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Selected Poems (2009); co-editor of Writing Couples and the Construction of Authorship (2006),and author of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1995) as well as over 20 essays and articles on EBB. She has also published on Frederick Douglass, Robert Browning, Dickens, Tennyson, Gaskell, Christina Rossetti, Toni Morrison, and Emily Dickinson, among other authors, and on contemporary topics such as the corporate university, multiculturalism, and cultural citizenship.

Dr. Naomi Masheti

Dr. Naomi Masheti is a Psychologist and a three-time graduate of UCC; she graduated with a BA in Applied Psychology in 2007, an MA in Forensic Psychology in 2008, and a PhD specialising in the Psychosocial Wellbeing of Sub-Saharan African Migrant Children in 2015.

As a direct result of her PhD, she developed a culturally sensitive training program for front line service providers which she has delivered in UCC (Psychology and BSW courses), UCD (Clinical Psychology program), the Good Shepherd Cork among others. Also, as a direct result of her PhD Naomi was instrumental in setting up the Cork Migrant Centre Psychosocial Wellbeing and Integration Hub at the Nano Nagle Place, focused on culturally sensitive services and transformative social justice work. She is a guest lecturer at the School of Psychology Cork. Naomi was the recipient of UCC 2020 Athena SWAN Equality Award.

David Mills

Mr. Mills holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College and an MA from New York University in creative writing. He’s published three collections, The Dream Detective, The Sudden Country and After Mistic (Massachusetts slavery poems). His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Brooklyn Rail, Colorado Review, Crab Orchard Review, Jubilat, Callaloo, Brooklyn Rail, Aloud: Live from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe and Fence. He has also received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Queens Council on the Arts, Breadloaf, The American Antiquarian Society and the Lannan Foundation. He lived in Langston Hughes’ landmark Harlem home for three years (and as an actor performs a one-person show of Hughes’ works). He wrote the audio script for Macarthur-Genius-Award Winner Deborah Willis’ curated exhibition: Reflections in Black:100 Years of Black Photography, which showed at the Whitney and Getty West Museums. The Juilliard School of Drama commissioned and produced a play by Mr. Mills. He has also recorded his poetry on ESPN and RCA Records.

Dr. Gera Burton

Gera Burton is a native of Dublin and a graduate of both University College Dublin and the University of Missouri, where she earned a PhD in Latin American and Afro-Hispanic Literature. She is the author of Ambivalence and the Postcolonial Subject: The Strategic Alliance of Juan Francisco Manzano and Richard Robert Madden (New York: Peter Lang, 2004). Her current project is a biography of Richard Robert Madden.

Giselle González García

Giselle GonzálezGarcía received her bachelor’s degree in history at the University of Havana in 2016. She was awarded a Concordia University Merit Scholarship and a Graduate Fellowship in Irish Studies and received an MA in History and Irish Studies in 2020 with a thesis entitled ‘Caught between Empires: Pre-Famine Irish Immigrants in Santiago de Cuba 1665-1847.’ She is a PhD candidate at the School of Irish Studies at Concordia University, Montreal. Her main research topic is Irish immigration to Cuba during the nineteenth century. She is a member of the Executive Committee for the Society for Irish Latin American Studies (SILAS).

Dr. Leslie E. Eckel

Leslie Elizabeth Eckel is Associate Professor of English at Suffolk University in Boston, where she teaches American literature, the literature of travel and migration, utopian and dystopian literature, and women’s and gender studies. She is the author of Atlantic Citizens: Nineteenth-Century American Writers at Work in the World (Edinburgh UP, 2013) and editor (with Clare Frances Elliott) of the Edinburgh Companion to Atlantic Literary Studies (Edinburgh UP, 2016). Her current projects include a monograph, Dwelling in Possibility: Atlantic Utopias and Countercultures, and a scholarly edition of Margaret Fuller’s collected works (with Sonia Di Loreto & Andrew Taylor).

Dr. Fionnghuala Sweeney

Fionnghuala Sweeney is Reader in American and Black Atlantic Literatures at Newcastle University. She has published widely on the career, writing and activism of Frederick Douglass, and on black Atlantic literature, culture and visual art more generally. Her publications include Frederick Douglass and the Atlantic World (2007), a study of Frederick Douglass’ relationship with Ireland, Haiti and Egypt; articles on Douglass’ Irish Narratives (2001, 2002); his performances (2004); on his novella, The Heroic Slave (2012); on his visual image-making and the relationship to memory (2018); and on his letter-writing (2021). She is co-editor with Alan Rice of the collection African Americans and Transatlantic Reform 1845-1865; with Fionnuala Dillane and Maria Stuart of Ireland, Slavery, Anti-slavery, Empire (2017); and articles, essays and special issues on emancipation, Irish anti-slavery writing, the Cuban slave narrative, and Afromodernisms. Fionnghuala is currently completing a book on the antislavery campaigner, writer and fugitive slave, Moses Roper.

Dr. Dónal Hassett

Dónal is a Lecturer in the French Department in University College Cork, specialising in colonial history. His first book, Mobilising Memory: The Great War and the Language of Politics in Colonial Algeria, 1918-1939 appeared with Oxford University Press in 2019.

He has published widely on issues of memory and commemoration. His current research explores the relevancy of debates around decolonising public heritage to the Irish context.

Dr Raymond Casserley

As Academic Director for the Global Institutes region, Ray supports the VP, Academic Affairs through overseeing the academic quality and development assurance processes for the several hundred courses offered and delivered in six Global Institutes (Berlin, Cape Town, London, Madrid, Paris, Rome). Ray holds a doctorate in ethnomusicology/anthropology of music from the School of History and Anthropology at Queen’s University Belfast. Aside from his previous teaching role at the Queen's University Belfast, he is experienced in the organization and delivery of numerous cross-community and cross-border initiatives with various music groups in Northern Ireland. Ray continues to incorporate his musical interests into his research on the highly sensitive political issue of parades in Northern Ireland. His academic interests include music and conflict, communal memory, and identity in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Find out more about Raymond here on the CIIE homepage.

Friday, 12th of Feb, 2021

Prof. John Stauffer

Prof. Stauffer is the Inaugural Kates Professor of English and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He is the author or editor of 20 books and over 100 articles, including GIANTS: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, a national bestseller; and the award-winning Black Hearts of Men, Battle Hymn of the Republic, and Picturing Frederick Douglass. His essays and reviews have appeared in Time, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, and in exhibition catalogs, journals, and books.

He has presented on national radio and TV and served as a consultant or co-curator on films, exhibitions, and video games, including God in America, Django Unchained, WAR/PHOTOGRAPHY, The Free State of Jones, The Abolitionists, Picturing Frederick Douglass, Red Dead Redemption 2, and Reconstruction: America After the Civil War.

He received two teaching awards from Harvard and was named a Walter Channing Cabot Fellow for "achievements and scholarly eminence in the fields of literature, history, or art."

In addition to his teaching, he is curating an exhibition on Frederick Douglass for the Smithsonian Museum's National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., scheduled to open in June 2023; and at work on a book on the abolitionist and civil rights leader Charles Sumner.

He lives in Cambridge with his wife, Deborah Cunningham, and their two sons, Erik and Nicholas.

Stella O’Leary

Stella O'Leary founded Irish American Democrats Political Action Committee in 1996, inspired by President Clinton's commitment to pursue a peace settlement in Northern Ireland. Stella continues to serve as President of the PAC raising millions of dollars in support of the campaigns of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and other candidates for State and Local elections who promote U.S. involvement in sustaining the Good Friday Peace Agreement.

President Obama appointed Stella as an Observer to the International Fund for Ireland where she served for seven years. Since 1986 the Fund has received more than a billion dollars of U.S. Congressional aid to support peace projects in Northern Ireland and the Border Counties.

A native of Dublin, Ireland, Stella graduated from the School of Library Science at University College, Dublin and emigrated to America to archive a collection of rare books and manuscripts at the Catholic University of America. She co-authored the reference volume Classical Studies: An Annotated Bibliography."

Stella was included four times in the Irish Voice newspaper listings of the 100 Top Irish Americans and twice in the recently inaugurated Irish America Magazine list of 50 Top Irish American Women.

Dr. Anne Donlon

Dr Anne Donlon holds a doctorate in English from the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She edited a volume of correspondence and poems, Langston Hughes, Nancy Cunard, and Louise Thompson: Poetry, Politics, and Friendship in the Spanish Civil War (Lost & Found CUNY Poetics Documents, 2012), and has published on work created by authors engaged in antifascist and antiracist organizing in the 1920s and 1930s in a number of publications, including PMLA and Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International. She also writes about the intersection of archives and digital scholarship and works as project manager for digital initiatives in the department of scholarly communication at the Modern Language Association. More information can be found here.

Dr. Maurice Casey

Dr Maurice J Casey is the DFA Historian in Residence at EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum. In this role he carries out original research into the history of the Irish abroad and highlights the work of other scholars exploring the Irish diaspora experience. He completed his doctoral studies at the University of Oxford, where his research focused on the international networks of Irish radical women during the interwar period. His research interests include Irish involvement in radical political movements at home and abroad across the 19th and 20th centuries and the history of race, racism and the Irish diaspora. His current book project explores the lives of Irish, British, German, Russian and American revolutionaries who lived together in a single Moscow hotel and their place within the world revolution of the early 20th century. More information can be found here.

Dr. Laurence Fenton

Dr. Laurence Fenton is a writer and editor living in Cork, Ireland. He received a PhD in History from University College Cork in 2003 before spending a number of years writing fiction (short stories that were published in newspapers and small literary journals) while working as an archaeologist and bookseller across Ireland and England. Since 2009, he has worked as an editor, copy-editor and proofreader on everything from cookery magazines to travel guides to biographies of figures like Rory Gallagher and Oscar Wilde. He has also published a number of history books in this time, including Frederick Douglass in Ireland: ‘The Black O’Connell’ (2014), which was praised by the Irish Times and the Irish Voice among other publications. His latest book, ‘I Was Transformed’: Frederick Douglass – An American Slave in Victorian Britain, was published by Amberley in February 2018 – the bicentenary of Douglass’s birth.

Olga Dermott

Olga Dermott is originally from Northern Ireland and lives in Warwickshire. She has had poetry and flash fiction published in a wide range of national and international magazines. In 2019 she won the BBC Proms poetry competition. Her first poetry pamphlet apple, fallen was published by Against the Grain Press in March 2020, and her second pamphlet "A sky full of strange specimens" is going to be published by Nine Pens Press later this year. She is a teacher and has two daughters.

Also part of Friday but mentioned above or elsewhere:

Roger Guenveur Smith
Clare Rose Thornton
Dr. Fionnghuala Sweeny
If there is information missing, we will be added in the next few days

Dennis J. Brownlee

Dennis J. Brownlee is the founder and president of African American Irish Diaspora Network. He became connected with Ireland after he began researching his family ancestry in recent years, following up on information his mother shared with him in his youth about his Scots-Irish ancestry in addition to his African American identity.

Dennis has had an extensive career as an entrepreneur and business development executive in media and entertainment. He was vice president at iHeartMedia in charge of syndicated urban radio and online networks including The Steve Harvey Morning Show, among others. Prior to that, he developed a cable TV network with Quincy Jones and David Falk that led to the launch of TVOne. He was a vice president and board member of United Stated Satellite Broadcasting Company, which launched the nation’s first satellite-to-home television broadcasting system in partnership with DirecTV, and he served as chairman of the Direct Broadcast Satellite Association.

Dennis is an Emmy Award winning executive producer of the documentary On Hallowed Ground: Streetball Champions of Rucker Park. He began his career in IT with IBM, and then developed an IT management firm that became one of Black Enterprise Magazine’s top 100 companies.

Dennis received his AB degree in economics from Princeton University. He is a trustee emeritus of Princeton and a trustee emeritus of Deerfield Academy.

Dr. Muiris MacGiollabhuí

Dr Muiris MacGiollabhuí is the Moore-Livingston Fellow for the 2020-2021 academic year at the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He finished his PhD in History at the University of California, Santa Cruz in June 2019. His work has appeared most recently in the Yearbook of Transnational History in the spring 2019 edition. This article, “Carrying the Green Bough: The Transnational Exile of the United Irishmen, 1791-1806,” explores the physical dimensions of exile that the United Irishmen experienced, and the psychological impact that exile had on them as they were cast all around the world. His next article, “Irish Liberty, Black Slavery, and the Green Atlantic: The Racial Ideology of the United Irishmen,” is currently under review for publication, and explores the contradictions of the United Irish racial ideology through the early ninteenth century. His current book project, "Sons of Exile: the Atlantic History of the United Irishmen, 1791-1830," hopes to explore the histories of the United Irishmen throughout the Atlantic World after the failed 1798 Rebellion. He has also begun research for a second book project: a comparative history of exiles in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which will explore the shared experiences of exile from the vantage of the Jamaican Maroons, French Acadians, Indian Tamils, and the United Irishmen.

Dr. Orla Murphy

Dr. Orla Murphy is head of the Department of Digital Humanities, School of English and Digital Humanities, University College Cork, Ireland. She is also the National Coordinator of DARIAH-IE and the Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities as well as the Irish National Representative on the Scientific Committee of CoST-EU; Co-operation in Science and Technology. Orla is also the Irish National Representative on the SSH SWG Social Science and Humanities Special Working Group of ESFRI the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures.
At UCC, she is the Co-Chair - Digital Education Advisory Group (DEAG) sub Committee University College Cork and the Deputy Chair - Learning and Teaching Committee (AC L&T), University College Cork. Her research explores the integration of emerging digital technologies (with)in the humanities in scholarship and in pedagogy. She has co designed and developed a series of innovative degrees that promote a standards-led approach, using international best practice for digitisation, in its multiplicity of forms, in order to create (amongst other outcomes) reusable learning objects that are malleable across many platforms and of interest to a wide range of citizens.
Her teaching and publications reflect corresponding interests in Old English language and culture; insular art and culture; movement of ideas from the Mediterranean world in the early medieval period; epigraphy; palaeography; codicology; textual transmission from orality to cyberculture.

Keith Wright

Keith L.T. Wright is the Director of Strategic Planning at Davidoff Hutcher & Citron LLP and works out of the firm’s New York Office. Mr. Wright’s focus is on assisting clients in their long-range strategic planning goals.

Mr. Wright joined DHC after serving 23 years in New York State Assembly, having chaired such committees as Housing, Election Law, Social Services, and Labor. His work on the Equal Economic Opportunity and Human Rights subcommittee sought protections for domestic workers and created additional benefits for senior citizens. Leading the Public Housing subcommittee, he championed the rights of public housing residents.

Also while in the Assembly, Mr. Wright chaired the Black, Puerto Rican and Hispanic Legislative Caucus and was a member of the Puerto Rican/Hispanic Task Force.

Active in his Harlem community, Mr. Wright has helped foster small business development, create affordable housing, and increase opportunities for youth. He has also served as the chairman of the Harlem Community Development Corporation.

Prior to his time in the Assembly, Mr. Wright held positions in New York City’s Human Resources Administration, the Manhattan Borough President’s Office and the New York City Transit Authority.

Dr. Catherine Gander

Catherine Gander is Associate Professor of American Literature at Maynooth University, where she co-runs the Poetry and Poetics event series. She is the author of Muriel Rukeyser and Documentary: The Poetics of Connection, the co-editor of Mixed Messages: American Correspondences in Visual and Verbal Practices, and is currently working on two scholarly book projects: a Companion to Don DeLillo and the Arts (for Edinburgh UP), and a monograph exploring Aesthetics of Displacement: Poetry, Art, Hybridity. Her literary criticism, poetry, and artwork can be found, or is forthcoming, in Ink, Sweat & Tears, One Hand Clapping, Juniper, Poetry Ireland Review, Wolf Poetry Magazine, and Irish Times, among others. She is the Chair of the all-island Irish Association for American Studies.

Kimberly Reyes

Kimberly Reyes is the author of the poetry collections Running to Stand Still (Omnidawn 2019) and Warning Coloration (dancing girl press 2018), and her nonfiction chapbook of essays Life During Wartime (Fourteen Hills 2019) won the 2018 Michael Rubin Book Award.

Gary Copeland Lilley

Gary Copeland Lilley is the author of eight books of poetry, the most recent being The Bushman's Medicine Show, from Lost Horse Press (2017), and a chapbook, The Hog Killing, from Blue Horse Press (2018). He is originally from North Carolina and now lives in the Pacific Northwest. He has received the Washington DC Commission on the Arts Fellowship for Poetry. He is published in numerous anthologies and journals. He is a Cave Canem Fellow.

Tess Gallagher

Tess Gallagher, American-born poet, has made Irish culture central to her life. Fifteen years ago, she purchased a cottage near her companion, the late painter Josie Gray, in Northwest Ireland where she had written her second book during the Vietnam War. Her eleventh book, IS, IS NOT, documents political and meditational crosscurrents in her Irish and American lives.

Gallagher attends to the work of her late husband, Raymond Carver, and participated in BIRDMAN and SHORT CUTS, films centered on his stories.

A lifelong witness to women’s concerns, the poem she reads documents a historic moment for Irish reproductive rights.

Don Mullan

Don Mullan is a bestselling author, filmmaker, concept developer and humanitarian. Amongst his several books are three politically influential investigative books that led to various inquiries. These include Eyewitness Bloody Sunday (1997), a primary catalyst for the ‘Bloody Sunday Inquiry’, the longest running and most expensive Public Inquiry in British legal history.

Don produced a trilogy of award-winning movies on the beginning (Bloody Sunday, 2002), end (Omagh, 2004) and aftermath (Five Minutes of Heaven, 2009), of the modern Irish ‘Troubles’.

Mullan is the recipient of several international awards including the Defender of Human Dignity Award (2003) from the International League for Human Rights; and is the first non-US recipient of the Race Amity Medal of Honor (2015) by the National Centre for Race Amity, Boston. He is the inspiration behind three major pieces of public art including the monument to Frederick Douglass at the University of Maryland. He re-published in Ireland the Narrative of Frederick Douglass in 2011 to commemorate the visit to Ireland of President Barrack Obama.

Mullan is an Executive Producer on The Great Green Wall (2019); and is a consultant to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD). He is Founder and CEO of Hope Initiatives International.

Chiamaka Enyi-Amadi

Chiamaka Enyi-Amadi is a writer, editor, performer and arts facilitator whose work is widely published. Her work has been featured in Poetry International 25, Poetry Ireland Review 127, RTÉ Poetry Programme, IMMA Magazine, Architecture Ireland, The Irish Times, and most recently in The Art of the Glimpse: 100 Irish Short stories anthology edited by Sinéad Gleeson. She is co-editor of Writing Home: The 'New Irish' Poets Anthology (Dedalus Press, 2019).

Clara Rose Thornton

Clara Rose Thornton is an award-winning essayist, multiple slam poetry champion, culture journalist, educator, and activist from Chicago. In the six countries in which she has lived, she has given speeches of sociopolitical import in a multitude of governmental and historical venues, performed thunderous spoken word poetry both musical and a cappella, and has worked with organizations and individuals to manifest several progressive firsts, including the inaugural Black History Month Ireland in 2014. While living in Ireland for six years, she won the Dublin Slam Poetry Championship three years in a row. She was a frequent RTE radio and television broadcaster, and wrote for the the Irish Independent, Irish Times, and District Magazine. Now repatriated to her home city, where she focuses on education and the Black Lives Matter movement, Clara Rose maintains close ties with Ireland through artistic and sociopolitical work

Saturday, 13th of Feb, 2021

Colum McCann

Colum McCann is the author of seven novels and three collections of stories. Born and raised in Dublin, Ireland, he has been the recipient of many international honours, including the National Book Award, the International Dublin Impac Prize, a Chevalier des Arts et Lettres from the French government, election to the Irish arts academy, several European awards, the 2010 Best Foreign Novel Award in China, and an Oscar nomination. In 2017 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts. His work has been published in over 40 languages. He is the co-founder of the non-profit global story exchange organisation, Narrative 4, and he teaches at the MFA program in Hunter College. He lives in New York with his wife, Allison, and their family.

Find this bio and read more about Colum here.

Dr. Barry Monahan

Dr. Barry Monahan lectures at University College Cork in the Department of Film & Screen Media. His areas of specialisation are Irish and European Cinemas, and Film Theory. He has written a history of the Abbey Theatre and film and, more recently, published a book on the films of Lenny Abrahamson.

Tom Sullivan

Tom Sullivan was born in Dublin and studied Earth Science at University College Galway. After graduating in 1995, he began acting and has worked consistently in film and television since then.

In 2010, Tom began writing and directing short films. His first short, Asal (2011), premiered at the 2011 Galway Film Festival where it won the Tiernan McBride Award for Best Short Drama. His second short, Mechanic (2014), won the same award three years later. In the interim, Tom directed Eoinín (2013) a half-hour film for television. In 2014 he co-wrote and directed Sínte, a 30-minute film for TG4, that won Best Short Drama at the Celtic Media Awards in 2015.

Tom’s latest short, Personal Development (2015), was funded by The Irish Film Board and had its North American premier at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2015. The film was subsequently invited to screen on all international airline flights as part of the Tribeca Presents Programme. Personal Development has also received nominations for numerous international awards, coming third overall for Best Short Drama at the Seattle International Film Festival 2015, and winning best short at the Irish Short Film and Music Festival 2015.

Tom was also nominated for a Zebbie Award in 2014 by the Irish Writers Guild for his work on Mechanic. In 2015 Tom directed Fir Bolg, a six-part comedy drama for TG4, that will be broadcast in Autumn 2016. He is currently developing a TV series and a feature film.

See Tomás O Suilleabháin at IMDB for his acting filmography.

Kevin McCann

Kevin McCann is a writer and film-maker from County Cavan. His drama and documentary work has examined history, faith, language and life along the Irish border. Supported by Screen Ireland and Northern Ireland Screen, he is currently developing the first feature film on the 1916 Easter Rebellion called ’The Rising’.

Dr. Michael Maloney

Dr. Michael Maloney is a Global Distinguished Professor and Professor of Music with an interest in Irish and Irish-American music and popular culture.

Find out more about Mick here.

Dr Jewell Parker Rhodes

Jewell Parker Rhodes is the award-winning author of several books for youth including Black Brother, Black Brother, named Chicago Public Library’s Best of the Best 2020, and the New York Times bestseller Ghost Boys which has garnered over 30 awards and honors including the Jane Addams Peace Award. Jewell is also the author of Towers Falling, winner of the 2017 Notable Books for a Global Society, and the celebrated Louisiana Girls’ Trilogy: Ninth Ward, winner of a Coretta Scott King Honor Award, Sugar and Bayou Magic.

Jewell has visited hundreds of schools across the country and is a regular speaker at colleges and conferences. The driving force behind all of Jewell’s work is to inspire social justice, equality, and environmental stewardship.

Jewell currently serves as the Piper Endowed Chair and founding artistic director of the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University. She enjoys teaching, walking her Toy Aussie Sheepdogs, theater, dancing, and music. Born in Pittsburgh, she now lives in Seattle.

You can find this bio and read more about Jewell here.

Maureen Grady

Maureen Grady is both an Irish and American citizen. She is a poet, actor, producer and teacher. She has taught Irish and British Literature, Shakespeare, and Creative Writing for many years. Maureen studied with both Seamus Heaney and Eavan Boland. She has won two teaching prizes: One of LA’s Most Inspiring Teachers, and a national recognition for teaching Creative Writing. Maureen is a graduate of Stanford University with a BA in Literature and in History. She also has a Masters in Theatre. She has worked in both the film industry and the theatre as an actor, assistant to director, associate producer and screenwriter. She recently acted in the acclaimed Italian film Euforia which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. Maureen volunteers for the Irish Screen LA & NYC film festivals, and for progressive political candidates and human rights causes. She has two beloved grown children, and divides her time between Ireland, Italy and America. Maureen has currently been at work in a cottage in Mayo on her play In the Hollow.

Lenwood (Leni) Sloan

Lenwood (Leni) Sloan is well known across the U.S. as a catalytic agent, animator, and facilitator of cultural and heritage programs. For the past 40 years, Mr. Sloan has provided inspiration, leadership and technical assistance both in the public and private sector.

Currently, Mr. Sloan serves as Executive Director of the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Monument Project which preserves, conserves, and rededicates historic and cultural monuments throughout the state. In that capacity, he is spearheading the placement of the first monument dedicated to the 15thand 19th amendments in the United States at Pennsylvania’s Capitol. He serves as Pennsylvania’s coordinator for the International Institute for Peace Through Tourism, as well as a board member for Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, Pennsylvania Downtown Association, Lancaster (Pa.) Heritage Society, and Lancaster (Pa.) Public Arts Program.

Before official retirement, Lenwood Sloan served as Pennsylvania's Film Commissioner and was certified by the Association of Film Commissioners International (AFCI). In that capacity, he directed the 60-million-dollar film tax credit office.

Throughout his career, Leni Sloan has served as Director of the National Endowment for the Arts landmark Presenting and Commissioning Program , Deputy Director of Services to the Field for the California Arts Council , director of New Orleans Arts and Tourism partnership (where he receive the Louisiana Travel and Tourism Leadership award and Gambit Communication's Business Enterprise Award,) and director of the dance program for San Francisco Arts Commission where he created the widely acclaimed San Francisco Dance Film Festival. You can find Len’s full bio here and learn more about his work.

Dr Chanté Mouton Kinyon

Chanté Mouton Kinyon is currently a Moreau Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Notre Dame. Kinyon’s primary research explores transnational African American literature and culture, with a particular interest in the way in which African American culture and literature intersects with Irish culture and literature. Her book project studies the influential representation Irish and African American artists have had on each other while theorizing the ways in which these artists signified and conceptualized race and marginality. The 2018-2019 NEH Fellow at the Keogh-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies, Kinyon was previously a four-year recipient of the Galway Research Fellowship for doctoral studies. Forthcoming, Kinyon’s article “Foregrounding (Lost) Rituals and The Transatlantic Gesture: The Keen, The Cakewalk, and Disappearing Cultural Practices,” will be published in Modern Drama in 2021, as will the introduction she wrote for Black Matters: African American College Students and Graduates Tell Their Life Stories, a book currently under contract with Cornell University Press.

Pamela J. Peters

Pamela J. Peters is a Diné multimedia documentarian from the Navajo Reservation where she was born and raised. Her first clan is Tachii’nii (Red Running into the Water clan), which she uses to identify her photography. Pamela’s work captures not only still images documenting people, cultures, and environments; she also incorporates storytelling with video digital capturing that is completed with a unique and distinctive creative style. Her creative lens explores the history and identity of her participants, which she calls Indigenous Realism, which often places a nostalgic aesthetic in her photographic images. She incorporates black and white photography to express her photography series: Legacy of Exiled NDNZ that explores the 1950s Indian Relocation program; and Real NDNZ Re-Take Hollywood, that evocates studio-style portraits of Hollywood glamour of the 1940s and 1950s.

Dr. Miriam Nyhan Grey

Dr. Miriam Nyhan Grey has been on faculty at New York University's Glucksman Ireland House 2009 teaching an array of classes on Irish and New York history and migration, oral history and comparative migration. Since 2008, she has been a collaborator on the oral history collection of the Archives of Irish America. She hosts the weekly This Irish American Life radio hour on public radio on Saturdays from 9am to 10am on WNYE 91.5 FM and on www.nyuirish.net/radiohour. Dr. Grey is the author of a social history of Ireland's only Ford plant and she edited a collection on America's role in 1916, published by UCD Press. In 2018 she founded the Black, Brown and Green Voices Project which documents and amplifies the diversity of the Irish diaspora.

Sunday, 14th of Feb, 2021

Nikkolas Smith

Nikkolas Smith, a native of Houston, Texas, is a Master of Architecture recipient from Hampton University. After designing theme parks at Walt Disney Imagineering for 11 years, he is now an ARTivist, Concept artist, Children's Books Author, Film Illustrator and Movie poster designer (Black Panther, Soul, Beale Street, Southside With You, Dear White People, Stranger Fruit). He is the author/illustrator of the picture books The Golden Girls of Rio (nominated for an NAACP Image Award) and My Hair Is Poofy And That's Okay. The latest children’s book he has illustrated, World Cup Women features the World Champion USWNT. He is a proud 2016 White House Innovators of Color fellow. His most famous and recognized works focus on Artivism. As an illustrator of color, Nikkolas creates captivating art that can spark important conversations around social justice in today's world and inspire meaningful change. Many of his viral and globally published sketches are included in his latest book Sunday Sketch: The Art of Nikkolas, a visual journey on life and a collection of more than 100 sketches he has done in the last five years. His works have been featured on TIME Magazine, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, Buzzfeed, the Academy of Motion Pictures, The Guardian, ABC, NBC, KCET, NPR, People and many more. His art has been shared on social media by Michelle Obama, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, Van Jones, Shaun King, Rihanna, Colin Kaepernick, Janet Jackson, Viola Davis, Jamie Foxx, Erykah Badu, Lupita Nyong'o, Kendrick Lamar, Tracee Ellis Ross, Ava Duvernay, Common, Simone Biles, Miley Cirus, Mark Ruffalo, Amy Schumer and many others. Nikkolas also talks at conferences (TEDxWatts) and schools all over the country, and leads workshops in digital painting character and movie poster and design. He lives in Los Angeles, California. You can find this bio and more information about Nikkolas here.

Erica Mock

Erica Mock has a career in sales spanning over 18 years for multiple major corporations. For the past six years she has dedicated her focus as an expert in integrated security systems for verticals spanning from healthcare to government. Erica attended The Ohio State University with a focus on African/African American Studies. Erica has held several board positions including Crime Stoppers of Central Ohio and a member of ASIS (The American Society of Industrialized Security) for many years and has serves as the Women in Security Chair and Legislative Chair n Columbus, OH. Erica is an advocate against human trafficking and domestic violence working with multiple agencies including former Attorney General now Governor Mike DeWine’s Blue Campaign and local domestic violence shelters aiding survivors. Ericahas since relocated to Rochester, NY to assume the role of VP of Strategic Partnerships and serves as the Co-Chair of the Racial Equity Initiative for Rochester City School District at Enrico Fermi School 17 and a working group member for Mayor Lovely Warren RASE( Racial and Structural Equity) Initiative. Erica continues the work and advocacy of Frederick and Anna Murray Douglass with a concentration of building stronger children and combating systems of exploitation and racial inequities.

Dr Lorna Goodwin

Executive Director of First Star Academies UK

First Star Academies UK partners with universities, virtual school heads, designated teachers and social services throughout the UK to make a long-term investment in Looked-after Children and change the course of their lives, from abuse and neglect to academic achievement and self-sufficiency.

Peter Samuelson

Producer and Executive Producer of 25 motion pictures over 25 years, including ARLINGTON ROAD, REVENGE OF THE NERDS, WILDE, TOM & VIV, THE LIBERTINE, STORMBREAKER & FOSTER BOY.

Media executive, strategy, operations and corporate governance expert, including Chairman of Executive Committee of Panavision, Inc., member of the three-person Founding Board of Participant Media, and Executive Vice President of the Interscope Group of Companies. Peter is a public speaker, lecturer and teacher. A founder and operator of five substantial charities: www.starlight.org, www.starbrightworld.org (with Steven Spielberg), www.firststar.org , www.edar.org and www.aspirelab.org, Final Round Committee Judge of (Oscars) Academy Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting. Peter is a university lecturer in media, pro-social engagement, millennial demographics, entrepreneurship, screenwriting, foster child advancement: UCLA, USC, USD, UCSD, UCR, Oxford University, George Mason University, NYU, United Nations.

Nettie Washington Douglass

Born in the town of Tuskegee, Alabama, at the historic Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University), Ms. Douglass has the unique distinction of being “heir of two great Americans.” She is the first person to unite the two bloodlines of Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglass through the union of her mother, Nettie Hancock Washington (granddaughter of Booker T. Washington), and her father, Dr. Frederick Douglass III (great-grandson of Frederick Douglass).

Ms. Douglass began representing one or both of her famous ancestors at special events when she was just a little girl. She presented the first 1950 San Francisco minted Booker T. Washington Commemorative Half Dollar to Joe DiMaggio; speaking at the New York State Sesquicentennial (150th) Anniversary Celebration in 1977 (where she received a citation naming her Ambassador of Goodwill); being commissioned a Kentucky Colonel; having a day named in her honor in Easton, MD; making her “acting” debut in Rochester, NY, and speaking at City Hall in Hamilton, Bermuda are just a few of Ms. Douglass’s numerous and varied appearances. On June 19, 2013, she also spoke at the dedication of the Frederick Douglass bronze statue at Washington DC’s Capitol Visitors Center in Emancipation Hall. She was in the company of her son, Kenneth, and America’s top leaders.

While Ms. Douglass gets tremendous pleasure from her “living history,” presentations to students throughout the country are profoundly fulfilling. Still vivid in her memory is what she describes as her most heartwarming experience to date. She accepted the challenge to assist in the fundraising efforts of the award-winning Frederick Douglass High School Marching Band of Atlanta, Georgia. Ms. Douglass’s commitment to these students proved to be successful, thus allowing them to accept the invitation of Bermuda officials to perform in the Bermuda Day Parade. The Frederick Douglass High School Marching Band has the distinction of being the first “off island” band to be invited to perform in Bermuda’s second-largest holiday celebration. “Witnessing an entire country embrace ninety-six students from an inner-city school is an experience I will treasure always.”

Ms. Douglass served as the national spokesperson for the “African-American Heritage Check Series.” She was instrumental in successfully introducing the check series to the Riggs National Bank of Washington (DC), the U.S. Department of Agriculture Credit Union and the Bank South Corporation of Georgia, now known as Bank of America. In recognition of this celebrated endeavor, Ms. Douglass was given a “key to the city” of Memphis, Tennessee, by its mayor and a citation from the mayor of Washington, DC.

Ms. Douglass considers her greatest honor to be the publishing of one of her speeches along with the most noted speeches of Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington: “What to the Slave is the 4th of July?” and the “Atlanta Cotton Exposition” speech, respectively. The speeches were featured in “Vital Issues – The Journal of African American Speeches.” Ms. Douglass is a past volunteer for the United Negro College Fund (founded by Dr. Frederick D. Patterson, the third President of Tuskegee Institute) and the Georgia State Games. She served on the Board of Directors for the Friends of Frederick Douglass Museum in Washington, DC and also serves on the Board of Directors for Frederick Douglass Family Initiatives.

While her life is decorated with honors, the best part has been raising her family. Her children are Kenneth B. Morris, Jr, Nettie Douglass Morris and Douglass Washington Morris.

JIM FITZPATRICK

Jim Fitzpatrick is an Irish artists, painter and activist.

Fitzpatrick's earliest work was the graphic portrait of Che Guevara, which was based on the photograph by Alberto Korda, entitled Guerrillero Heroico, was taken on 5 March 1960.

Fitzpatrick has produced artwork for bands such as Thin Lizzy including their Jailbreak album in 1976, for Sinéad O'Connor's 2000 album Faith and Courage, for The Darkness' 2003 single "Christmas Time (Don't Let the Bells End)", Norwegian black metal band Darkthrone's 2013 album cover The Underground Resistance, and took the photograph for the cover of Louise Patricia Crane's 2020 album Deep Blue. He was commissioned by CityJet in 2007 to create images reflecting Ireland's culture, mythology, history and landscapes. Find out more about Jim here and on his website.

Turtle Bunbury

Turtle Bunbury is an author, historian and public speaker based in Ireland. His books include the upcoming The Irish Diaspora (launches 11 March 2021), Ireland's Forgotten Past (2020) and the award-winning Vanishing Ireland series. His account of Frederick Douglass in Ireland appears in his Kindle book Hope in 1847. See Turtle’s website for more information.

Turtle’s book ‘The Irish Diaspora’ launches on 11 March 2021.

Dr. Michael Waldron

Dr. Michael Waldron is an art historian and curator who specialises in Irish painting, sculpture, and historic collections. He is Assistant Curator of Collections & Special Projects at Crawford Art Gallery, a national cultural institution dedicated to the visual arts in the heart of Cork city. In 2016, he received his PhD from University College Cork, where he also taught literature and art history, and worked on the interdisciplinary project Deep Maps: West Cork Coastal Cultures. He is the curator of Recasting Canova, Mise Éire, and Harry Clarke Marginalia. He has also published on Irish artists Samuel Forde, John Hogan, Patrick Hennessy, John Rainey, and the writer Elizabeth Bowen.

Dr. Kathleen Kelley Reardon

Dr. Kathleen Kelley Reardon, Professor Emerita of Management and Organization at the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business, has served on the faculty of the MBA, Executive MBA and International MBA programs and on the faculty of Preventive Medicine. She was named Distinguished Research Scholar by the Irish Management Institute and has been a visiting professor at Trinity and University College Dublin. Kathleen is a leading authority on workplace politics, leadership and gender issues. She was co-principal investigator on the Starbright Foundation feasibility study spearheaded by producer Peter Samuelson and later chaired by Steven Spielberg. The Foundation links critically and terminally ill children and their families to online education, entertainment, social networking and social support. She also originated and co-founded with Peter Samuelson First Star pre-college academies for foster teens now throughout the U.S. and in the UK. In 2013, the University of Connecticut Alumni Association named her Humanitarian of the Year.

EMMA DABIRI

ONE OF THE BBC’S BROADCASTING STARS OF THE FUTURE, EMMA DABIRI IS A PRESENTER, SOCIAL HISTORIAN AND WRITER. Emma's latest documentary Black Hair (Channel 4) asks some of the most important questions facing the Black British population - and how it is that hair became one of the most misunderstood, celebrated and debated aspects of the black experience. Emma co-presents Britain’s Lost Masterpieces on BBC 4 and Virtually History on YouTube Originals, Back in Time for Brixton and the Back in Time Confectioners series (BBC Two), Is Love Racist? (Channel 4) and has made a number of social history films for The One Show (BBC).

On radio she has hosted BBC Radio 4’s Saturday Review and Front Row. She has authored a landmark Radio 4 documentary, Journeys in Afrofuturism as well as EXPOSED: Young Female Photographers which explores the work of three exciting emerging photographers. She is also developing a documentary on Haitian Surrealism.

Emma's debut bestselling book ‘Don’t Touch My Hair’ is available now, published by Penguin, Allen Lane. Her second book is due out in 2021; ‘What White People Can Do Next. From Allyship to Coalition’.

Emma is currently on the judging panel for the Merky Books New Writers’ Prize 2020-2021 founded by Stormzy which aims to discover unpublished, under-represented writers aged 16-30 from the UK and Ireland.

During lockdown in spring 2020 Emma founded Disobedient Bodies, a virtual space and book club that celebrates and encourages disobedience. She has interviewed women like Booker Prize nominee Kiley Reid and American Irish Dance sensation Morgan Bullock.

Emma’s interdisciplinary work crosses African Studies, art, sociology, history, film, literature, theatre, popular culture and music. She is a teaching fellow in the Africa department at SOAS. Emma is also a seasoned public speaker and has been invited to present her work at a wide range of cultural institutions from Tate Britain, to the British Museum, to Oxford University, St Andrews and Yale.

Suzanne Lynch is the Washington Correspondent for the Irish Times.

Prior to her posting to Washington, she was European Correspondent for the Irish Times. Based in Brussels for four years, she led coverage of the euro zone crisis, Brexit and the refugee crisis. During her career at the Irish Times she worked as a financial journalist, covering both domestic and international business news. She has also written extensively for British and Irish media on arts and cultural issues.

She holds a BA from University College Dublin and a PhD in English Literature from Cambridge University.

She currently covers US politics from Washington and is a regular contributor on radio and TV in Ireland and internationally.

KEVIN O'BRIEN

Kevin has a lifelong passion for drawing, painting, and general mark-making activities and with a Masters in History of the Irish Revolutionary Period, UCC, as well as Journalism & New Media, CIT, he's passionate about telling stories through various forms. Over the past few years, he has been splashing colour on walls to create vibrant and fun street art pieces in Cork and beyond. Some have been solo projects while many more have been collaborations with community groups, sports clubs, schools, businesses, and others. He also facilitates art workshops for children and takes part in classroom visits.

His history and journalism works include written interviews, features, photography and videos covering a wide range of topics which have been broadcast and published. Most notably, he produced a history documentary, Reabhloid Choircal, detailing the events of the 1916 Easter Rising in Cork which aired on TG4. He is a Co-Founder of a street art and guerilla gardening group, Mad About Cork. He has led many projects aimed at beautifying the city through community-led action. These include, but are not limited to, transforming derelict spaces into urban gardens, leading volunteer meet-ups, creating street art across the city, organising Spring clean-up days, 'Cycle and Plant' events, bat box building workshops, cycling street art tours, walking tours, live street art painting events, photography exhibitions, and much more! In recognition of their work, Mad About Cork won a Lord Mayor's Community Award in 2019 and were also nominated for a Pride of Place Award, an island award aimed at promoting relationships between communities north and south of the border in Ireland. Find this bio and more information about Kevin here.

Robert (Bob) Manson

Bob lives Celbridge Co. Kildare and is the Director of Pembroke Hall, a commercial real estate firm based in Dublin. He is a graduate of University College Dublin where he was awarded a degree in Law in 1990. He was awarded a MPA from Harvard University in 2004. Bob is the Harvard Alumni Association Director for Europe and he is also a Member of the Harvard Alumni Association Anti Racism Working Group and a volunteer for the Special Olympics Ireland.

Lord Mayor of Dublin Hazel Chu

Councillor Hazel Chu was elected the 352nd Lord Mayor of Dublin at the Annual Meeting of Dublin City Council held on 29th June 2020 in the Round Room at the Mansion House. Councillor Mary Callaghan was elected the Deputy Lord Mayor.

Hazel Chu was born and raised in Dublin. She grew up in the suburb of Firhouse, before moving to Celbridge, and now lives in Ranelagh with her partner Patrick and their 2 year old daughter Alex.

She first became involved in politics in 2014, when she ran her partner’s local election campaign. In 2019, she became the first Green Party councillor to be elected in the local elections for the ward of Pembroke and topped the poll with over 4,000 first preference votes. In the same year she was elected Chair of the Party.

She studied politics and history in UCD and trained to be a barrister at Kings Inns. While studying she worked as a fundraising consultant for non-profits and as a production manager for music festivals. After being called to the Bar in 2007 she worked in Sydney, Hong Kong and Guilin. Upon returning home she was offered a Fellowship by UCD Smurfit and worked in New York for Bord Bia. She has worked in various management roles and in 2013 became Diageo’s Head of Brand, Corporate and Trade Communications.

Councillor Chu was the first person in her family to finish school and go to college. Her parents are from Hong Kong. They met in Ireland in the 1970s.

In her spare time she lends her voice to promoting diversity and equality, and is a regular media contributor. Her first loves are her daughter, running election campaigns, surfing, and cooking. Since she was a teenager she has worked in her mother’s restaurant in every position from dishwasher to waitress, to sous chef.

Hazel Chu is the 9th woman to hold the office of the Lord Mayor of Dublin.

Mary Robinson

First woman President of Ireland and former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights; a passionate, forceful advocate for gender equality, women’s participation in peace-building and human dignity.

• Chair of The Elders

• President of Ireland 1990-1997

• United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights 1997-2002

• Chancellor of the University of Dublin 1998-2019

• UN Envoy on Climate Change 2014-15

• UN Special Envoy on El Niño and Climate 2016

• Adjunct Professor for Climate Justice, Trinity College Dublin 2019

Find out more about Mary Robinson here.

Dr. Ebun Joseph

Dr Ebun Joseph is a Race relations consultant, Director Institute of Antiracism and Black Studies and Chairperson, African Scholars Association Ireland (AFSAI). She started the first Black Studies module in Ireland in UCD where she lectures and coordinates the module in Black Studies and critical race theory in Education. She was a Teaching Fellow at TCD, Career Development Consultant at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, and Training and Employment Officer at Business in the Community Ireland. Dr Joseph has a PhD in Equality Studies from UCD School of Social Justice. She has an M.Ed. in Adult Guidance and Counselling from Maynooth University; an IACP accredited diploma in Professional Counselling and a B.Sc. in Microbiology from the University of Benin. Ebun is an author, TV panellist, Columnist and an equality activist. With a research focus on Labour markets and race relations, she has presented at several conferences, businesses and nonprofits. Ebun is published and contributes regular responses on contemporary issues of race and racism in Ireland. Her recent book is titled, Racial stratification in Ireland: A Critical race theory of labour market inequality with Manchester University press. She also co-authored the book, Challenging Perceptions of Africa in Schools: Critical Approaches to Global Justice Education with Routledge. Ebun recently launched the #NoToBrainWaste Campaign which highlights the barriers faced by under-employed and over-qualified migrants and Irish-born ethnic minorities.