Dr Éimear O’Connor is an art historian and is the Clare and Tony White post-doctoral research fellow at TRIARC-Irish Art Research Centre, Trinity College Dublin. Her art-historical research interests are wide-ranging. She is particularly interested in the complex national and international contexts pertaining to the construction of Irish visual identity in the late nineteenth and twentieth century. She has a keen interest in the position of the Royal Hibernian Academy in the narrative of Irish art history in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. O’Connor’s research also encompasses the development of European and American modernism in the twentieth century. She has given lectures and courses on Irish, European and American art in several academic and art institutions in Ireland.

The subject of her PhD research was Irish artist Seán Keating (1889-1977) PPRHA, HRA, HRSA and she curated an exhibition of his work for The Hunt Museum in Limerick (June-Sept. 2009). She has published articles and reviews on Irish art and artists and is author of Seán Keating in Context: Responses to culture and politics in post-civil war Ireland (Dublin 2009), and editor of Irish Women Artists 1800-2009: familiar but unknown (Dublin 2010). She is presently engaged in writing a monograph on Seán Keating (1889-1977) PPRHA, HRA, HRSA.

In order to facilitate and promote collegial interaction between the RHA and the academic community at large, O’Connor recently re-catalogued the RHA archive. She will continue to work with the RHA Council to ensure that the archive is maintained, augmented, and made available to researchers.

O’Connor was elected an Honorary RHA on 19 October 2010.