Briona Nic Dhiarmada

Briona Nic Dhiarmada is an Irish scholar and author specializing in the Irish language, Irish cultural history, and the legacy of the 1916 Easter Rising. She is a professor at the University of Notre Dame, where she holds the Thomas J. and Kathleen Walsh Chair in Irish Language and Literature and serves as the director of the Irish Studies program. Her scholarship has made significant contributions to the study of Irish-language poetry and to the cultural memory of Irish independence.

Her book The 1916 Irish Rebellion, published in 2016 to coincide with the centenary of the Easter Rising, accompanied a major documentary film of the same title that aired on RTE, PBS, and BBC. The book examines the Rising’s origins, execution, and contested legacy with scholarly depth and narrative accessibility. It draws on new archival sources and revisits the events with a fresh eye for both their historical significance and their continuing resonance in contemporary Irish life.

Nic Dhiarmada is also the author of Téacs agus Comhthéacs: Gnéithe de Chritic na Gaeilge, a scholarly work on Irish-language literary criticism, and has written extensively on the poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. She has been a presenter and contributor to television and radio documentaries on Irish history and literature produced by RTE, TG4, and other broadcasters.

Her work sits at the intersection of cultural nationalism, language revival, and postcolonial theory, and she is recognized as one of the leading scholars of Irish literary and cultural history working in the United States. She continues to teach, research, and speak about the Irish language as both a living cultural inheritance and a literary medium of continuing vitality.