Dr. Aine Mcgillicuddy

Dr Áine McGillicuddy is Assistant Professor in the School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies (SALIS) where she lectures in German Studies and Children's & YA Literature Studies. 

Áine was Vice-President / President of the Irish branch of the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY) and a long-standing executive committee member of the Irish Society for the Study of Children's Literature (ISSCL) for over ten years. More recently, she represented DCU's Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences as a board member of the Irish Humanities Alliance (December 2017-2020). She is a member of DCU's Centre for Translation and Textual Studies (CTTS) and was the Research Centre's Director from January 2017-August 2020. From 2022-2026 she was the Irish representative on the committee for Women in German Studies (UK and Ireland) and is now an appointed member of the Royal Irish Academy's Languages, Literature, Culture & Communication Multidisciplinary Committee (2026-2030).

Currently, Áine is Principal Investigator on the DCU research team for the EU co-funded Creative Europe project "G-Book 3: Audience engagement activities for the social and emotional education of EU teens throughgender-positive literature and digital technology" (2024-2027) and was co-Principal Investigator in DCU for "G-Book 2: European teens as readers and creators" (2020-2023). In addition, she is a research team member of the DAAD-funded project: "Elizabeth Shaw's Irish Berlin" (2025-2026).

Áine was Chair of the judging panel for the national KPMG Children's Books Ireland Awards (2023-2025) and regularly reviews new children's and YA fiction for Children's Books Ireland (CBI) and specialist children's literature studies journals, such as Bookbird. She is a member of the Editorial Boards for the international journals New Directions in the Humanities and Anuario de Investigación en Literatura Infantil y Juvenil (AILIJ).