Diarmuid Ó Giolláin

Biography

Diarmuid Ó Giolláin is Professor of Irish Language and Literature, Concurrent Professor of Anthropology and Fellow of the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies.

He specializes in cultural history, folklore studies – especially the history of ideas and of institutions - and popular religion. His major publications are Locating Irish Folklore: Tradition, Modernity, Identity (Cork University Press, 2000), An Dúchas agus an Domhan (Cork University Press, 2005), and Exotic Dreams in the Science of the Volksgeist: Towards a Global History of European Folklore Studies (The Kalevala Society, 2022).

Locating Irish Folklore won the Katherine Briggs Folklore Prize 2000 and was runner-up for the Radcliffe Prize 2001. Exotic Dreams in the Science of the Volksgeist was the winner of the Chicago Folklore Prize 2023.

Ó Giolláin also edited Léann an Dúchais: Aistí in Ómós do Ghearóid Ó Crualaoich (Cork University Press, 2012, with Stiofán Ó Cadhla) and Irish Ethnologies (University of Notre Dame Press, 2017). A version of Irish Ethnologies previously appeared as a special number of Ethnologie française (2011/2-avril), “Irlande: Après Arensberg et Ó Duilearga.”

His most recent essays include the following:

“Lamberto Loria, ‘L’etnografia strumento di politica interna e coloniale’” in U. Marzolph (ed.), Reading Matters: An Unfestschrift for Regina Bendix (Göttingen, 2023), 297-302.

“Colonial Legacies in European Folklore Studies” in M. Brolsma et al. (eds), Networks, Narratives and Nations: Transcultural Approaches to Cultural Nationalism in Modern Europe and Beyond [Festschrift for Joep Leerssen] (Amsterdam, 2022), 127-135.

“Major Minority Languages: Irish and Ukrainian” in S. Velychenko et al. (eds), Ireland and Ukraine: Studies in Comparative Imperial and National History (Stuttgart, 2022), 135-156.

“La cultura quotidiana nella Dublino di Joyce.” In the new Italian translation of Joyce’s Ulysses. Ulisse, ed. and trans. E. Terrinoni (Rome: Bompiani 2021), XLIX-LXIII.

“The Irish-English Dictionary of Fr Patrick Dinneen” in J. Roper (ed.), Dictionaries as Sources of Folklore Data (Helsinki, 2020), 39-58.

“In Search of the Volksgeist in Argentina and Ireland” in Actas del I Simposio de Estudios Irlandeses. Suplemento Ideas (Revista de la Escuela de Lenguas Modernas, Universidad del Salvador, Buenos Aires) 2: 2 (2020), 63-70.