Maynooth University Faculty of Arts, Celtic Studies & Philosophy

Born in NYC to Irish-actor parents, Oona has lived in Ireland full-time since completing her Ph.D. at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York. She has held post-doctoral fellowships at Queen's University Belfast and Trinity College Dublin, and has lectured in the Department of English at Maynooth University since 2008. Oona's research interests lie in Irish Studies, particularly of the late 19th and 20th centuries; in Memory and Trauma Studies; in ecocriticism; and in writings of New Zealand and Australia. Oona is currently writing a book on postcolonial ecocriticism, comparing Irish, American, Australian and New Zealand literature for attitudes towards land development, waste, and the environment.

She has supervised students working on transnational literature, trauma studies, and ecocriticism, and is currently supervising a project on trauma, identity and ethics in mid-20th century Irish writing. As of 2019, she is also supervising creative writing PhDs and would welcome proposals in her academic research fields and in creative writing.

Oona is also a fiction writer. A Hennessy Award nominee, her first novel, Flight (2014), was the first publication of the acclaimed Tramp Press and was nominated for an Irish Book Award and a Literary Fiction Award. Her next novel is entitled My Amygdala, Charging, and she is currently writing another novel, All the Places I Was Not Born. She is represented by Lucy Luck at C&W.