Dr Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire is an award-winning chef, culinary historian, lecturer, PhD supervisor, broadcaster, and ballad singer. He is senior lecturer in the School of Culinary Arts and Food Technology, and co-PI at Technological University Dublin’s Centre of Irish Studies. Over the last twenty years, he has been to the forefront of food history and food studies internationally with his organisation of symposia in Oxford, Dublin, France and Poland. With a Google Scholar citation score of over 1025, he is among the leading scholars globally in the fields of Irish food history, gastronomy, and research on chefs. In 2009, he became the first Irish chef to be awarded a PhD for his Oral History project about the history of public dining in Dublin restaurants 1900-2000 (9,434 downloads). In 2025 he graduated with his second PhD titled ‘Championing Food Studies in the Field of Irish Studies’. He co-founded and chairs of the biennial Dublin Gastronomy Symposium (DGS), which won a Golden Arrow Award in 2018 for most impactful conference hosted on TU Dublin’s ARROW Open Access Repository. Since 2012, the uploaded 363 DGS conference papers, have been downloaded over 167,738 times.

A former two-term trustee of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery (2015-2021), he currently curates their Oral History Project. A former board member of the National Centre for Franco-Irish Studies (NCFIS), he is now joint Principal Investigator of the TU Dublin Centre for Irish Studies, which coordinates conferences and publications in Ireland and abroad. Since 2017 he is co-founder and chair of the Masters in Gastronomy and Food Studies in TU Dublin, the first such programme in Ireland. He is co-editor with Eamon Maher of New Beginnings: Perspectives from France and Ireland (Peter Lang: 2023) and ‘Tickling the Palate’: Gastronomy in Irish Literature and Culture (Peter Lang: 2014). He was also guest-editor with Rhona Richman Kenneally on ‘The Food Issue’ of The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies (2018).

In 2021, Máirtín guest edited a special issue of Folk Life: Journal of Ethnological Studies 59(2) on Irish Food Ways and to date, the combined six papers and editorial have 25,125 downloads. He has published widely in peer-reviewed journals, edited books, conference proceedings and encyclopaedias, and is a regular contributor on food history in the media, nationally and internationally. In 2021 he joined the organising committee of the Food and Drink as (medicine, curse, gift etc.) conference in collaboration with Pedagogical University Cracow, Poland.
In 2018, Máirtín presented an eight-part television series for TG4 called ‘Blasta’ celebrating Ireland’s food heritage, in conjunction with the Irish Folklore Commission, which has been rebroadcasted regularly internationally. In 2021, along with Michelle Share and Dorothy Cashman, he co-founded and co-edits the ‘open access’ European Journal of Food, Drink, and Society (EJFDS), and is on the editorial advisory panels of several other international journals. A special issue of the EJFDS in 2025 focused on Irish Food History. Máirtín has successfully supervised nine PhD students to completion and acted as external examiner on eight PhDs in Ireland, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia. In both 2021, 2022 and 2024, he was awarded a Research Ally Prize by the Irish Research Council for the positive impact he has made as a PhD supervisor. In 2024, his co-edited Irish Food History: A Companion (EUt+ Academic Press: Royal Irish Academy, 2024) won the An Post Food and Drink Book Award. The volume is available open access and has been downloaded 8,758 times.