Dr Mary Ann Bolger

Dr Mary Ann Bolger is head of the discipline of Media Arts at the School of Media, TU Dublin. She is a lecturer in Design History and Visual Culture and was previously programme chair of the Creative Arts Masters Platform and the BA in Creative Industries and Visual Culture in the School of Art & Design

Mary Ann studied at Drama and History of Art at Trinity College Dublin and Design History and Material Culture at the Royal College of Art, London, where she also received her doctorate. Her PhD thesis was ‘Designing Modern Ireland: the role of graphic design in the construction of an image of modern Ireland at home and abroad (1949-1979).’ She supervises PhDs in the areas of Irish design and visual culture, museum studies and typographic history.

Mary Ann is a peer reviewer for the Journal of Design History, has served on the Professional Panel of the 100Archive and is a judge on both Professional and Graduate Awards at the Institute of Designers in Ireland. She represented Ireland as country delegate to the Association Typographique Internationale (ATypI) from 2005 to 2022. With Clare Bell, Mary Ann programmes the GradCAM research group Typography Ireland. 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 and organisations.

Before moving to TU Dublin in 2009, Mary Ann taught at Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication (now part of University of Greenwich) and at Waterford Institute of Technology (now SETU).

Design and material culture in and of Ireland; gender, design and creative industries; visual culture; graphic design, typography and language; the visual culture of the everyday; the material culture of religion. 

Books:

Design Factory: On the Edge of Europe. Dublin & Amsterdam: Lilliput/BIS, 2009.

Book Chapters:

‘Materialities,’ in Religion and Irish Literature (Cambridge Themes in Irish Literature), edited by Willa Murphy and Christopher Murray (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming)

 ‘Counting the days: the material culture of indulgences,’ in Salvador Ryan (ed) Death and the Irish: A Miscellany (Word Well Books, 2016).

‘Redesigning the Rising: Typographic commemorations of 1916’ in Lisa Godson and Joanna Bruck (eds) Making 1916: the visual and material culture of the Easter Rising (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015).

‘Patrick Scott’s Work for Signa Design Consultants’ in Christina Kennedy (ed.) Patrick Scott: Image Space Light (Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2014).

‘The Ephemera of Eternity: the Irish Catholic memorial card as material culture’ in Elaine Sisson and Linda King (eds) Ireland, Design and Visual Culture: Negotiating Modernity, 1922-1992 (Cork: Cork University Press, 2011).

‘Dolmen Press’ and ‘Daniel Maclise: book illustrator’ in Michael F. Suarez and H.R. Woudhuysen (eds) The Oxford Companion to the Book (Oxford: OUP, 2009).

‘Inventory of Carved Stones in Kells Priory’ in Miriam Clyne (ed) Kells Priory (Dublin: Office of Public Works, 2007).