Sarah O'Connor is currently Assistant Professor of Celtic Studies in St. Michael's College, University of Toronto. A former Government of Ireland Higher Education Authority Scholar, her doctoral dissertation was entitled 'Women and Social Change in Twentieth Century Ireland: Bilingualism, Regionalism and Translation in Irish Women's Writing, 1960--2006'. The central research focus of that dissertation was the concept of interstitiality, which is used to account for the creative and subversive role of bilingualism, regional dialect and translation in a variety of creative texts by Irish women. She was also one of the Irish-language researchers working on the Database of Irish Women Writers 1800--2005 funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and directed by Professor Gerardine Meaney (University College Dublin) and Professor Maria Luddy (University of Warwick). Christopher Shepard was a Government of Ireland Higher Education Authority Scholar based at Queen's University Belfast. His doctoral dissertation, entitled 'Women activists and organisations in Ireland, 1945--68', examined the role of non-feminist organisations in encouraging female activism and promoting social and legislative change in Ireland during the middle-decades of the twentieth-century. In his next project, he hopes to explore the lives and work of Irish Protestant women missionaries in the Far East, 1935--51.

He is currently a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Trinity College Dublin.