Dr Mary Ann Bolger
My Bio
Dr Mary Ann Bolger is the Programme Chair of the Creative Arts Masters Platform. She lecturers in Design History and Visual Culture at the TU Dublin School of Creative Arts and was formerly chair of the BA in Creative Industries and Visual Culture.
Mary Ann received her doctorate and her MA in the History of Design from the Royal College of Art, London. Her research interests include design in and of Ireland, graphic design, typography and language, the visual culture of the everyday, and the material culture of religion. She supervises PhDs in the areas of Irish design and visual culture, museum studies and typographic history. With Dr Glenn Loughran, Mary Ann co-ordinates research activity in the School.
Some of her recent publications include a chapter on typographic commemoration in Making 1916: Material and Visual Culture of the Easter Rising, edited by Lisa Godson and Joanna Brück (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015) and ‘Counting the days: the material culture of indulgences,’ a chapter in Salvador Ryan’s edited volume Death and the Irish: a Miscellany (Word Well Books, 2016). She is the author of Design Factory: On the Edge of Europe (Dublin: Lilliput & Amsterdam: BIS, 2009), a monograph on the Dublin graphic design studio. Mary Ann serves on the Professional Panel of the 100Archive and is a judge on the IDI graduate awards. She regularly presents papers at peer-reviewed conferences and speaks on radio about design and typography. She also works from time to time as a consultant with design firms.
Research interests include design in and of Ireland, visual communication, typography and language.
With her TU Dublin colleague, Clare Bell, Mary Ann represents Ireland as country delegate of the Association Internationale Typographique. Together they programme the GradCAM seminar group Typography Ireland. They also organised the 2015 Face Forward International Typography Conference, part-funded by Irish Design 2015 and ‘The Word,’ the 2010 annual ATypI conference, hosted by DIT.
