The University of Limerick (UL) is located on the west coast of Ireland with state-of-the-art teaching and research facilities and approximately 18,000 students, including more than 2,000 international students.
Founded in 1972, UL is a young and enterprising university with a proud record of innovation in education and scholarship.
In 2021, UL received 5 stars under the QS Stars Rating System. In addition to the highest overall rating, UL also earned the highest five-star rating in: Teaching, Employability, Research, Internationalisation, Facilities, Innovation, and Inclusiveness.
Supporting and promoting inclusion, diversity, and participation in all aspects of education for students and staff is a key objective of UL, with an infrastructure in place including a Director of Human Rights and Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion. As a member of the Athena Swan Charter, UL recognises and encourages a commitment to gender mainstreaming in all areas of higher education and is a designated University of Sanctuary.
UL Engage was established in September 2015, with the aim to integrate civic and community engagement into the University’s core missions in research and teaching. It serves as the hub for civic engagement activities across campus and works with all divisions and faculties to amplify, incubate and co-ordinate the various ways that students, faculty, and staff in UL can work to make a difference.
In 2018 UL joined the UNESCO–sponsored Knowledge for Change (K4(C) global alliance of HE Institutions committed to best practice community-based learning and research – complimenting Limerick, which is designated as a UNESCO Learning City. With strong links to business, industry and the community, UL excels at translational research which aims to accelerate the practical application of academic research to benefit society. UL houses some of the most innovative and successful research centres in Ireland, among which the Nexus Innovation Centre – a growing community of international researchers and entrepreneurs which supports new businesses and the creation of jobs.
UL has a long-standing and proud tradition in European Studies, with the first dedicated BA in European Studies in Europe and the first MA in European Integration. UL pioneered the concept of Cooperative Education in Ireland, placing more than 2,000 students in paid work placements annually – 30% of these as international placements – and has the largest Erasmus+ mobility programme in Ireland with more than 600 academic placements per year across a network of 350 partners. Erasmus+ at UL has won the Best Erasmus+ Programme in the Irish Education Awards in 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2022.
The University of Limerick (UL), is an internationally focused university with a diverse range of programs and a commitment to shaping the future through education and empowerment. The university actively supports the UN Sustainable Development Goals and fosters international partnerships in research and education.
Angela Farrell
Dr Angela Farrell is Assistant Dean International of the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Limerick, Course Director of the International Structured PhD- AHSS, Course Director of the UL Summer Institute Programme and the UL International PhD Bridging Programme, a Lecturer in the TESOL/Linguistics Section, Erasmus Coordinator TESOL/Linguistics, and External Examiner at the University of Ulster. She has taught extensively on undergraduate and post graduate language teacher education programmes. Her teaching and research interest are in L2 classroom discourse, applied corpus linguistics, L2 teacher education, reflective practice and migrant children education and multilingualism in schools. She is a member of the Centre for Applied Language Studies, the Inter-Varietal Corpus Studies Group, the British Association of Applied linguistics, and the Irish Association of Applied Linguistics. She has published in the areas of L2 teacher education, applied corpus linguistics, English as an additional language provision in schools, reflective practice and EFL pedagogy.
She currently teaches on three MA level teacher education programmes (TESOL/Applied Linguistics/Professional Masters in Language Teaching) and the Structured PhD in TESOL/Structured PhD AHSS and is a Teaching Practice supervisor in post-primary schools. She supervises research at PhD, MA, and FYP research, and is involved in a number of Erasmus + educational projects with EU partner universities.
Anita Barmettler
Anita Barmettler has worked at UL since 2014, where she teaches the German language, the history of German-speaking countries and current affairs, as well as German-language literature, and European cinema. She is also involved in teaching in the Professional Master of Education.
Anita studied Cultural Studies with focus on Jewish Studies at the University of Lucerne. She wrote her PhD about the three Kindertransport poets Karen Gershon, Gerda Mayer and Lotte Kramer. Her research interests are Jewish literature and culture, transcultural literature and cinema, language teaching through literature and intercultural communication.
Catherine Jeanneau
Catherine Jeanneau currently works as coordinator of the Language Learning Hub in the School of Modern Languages and Applied Linguistics, University of Limerick, Ireland. Her research interests include second language acquisition, technology and language learning with a particular focus on digital literacy and digital citizenship as well as learner autonomy. She is involved in several national and international projects, including projects on digital citizenship and language education with the European Commission (Erasmus+ project Lingu@num) and with the European Centre for Modern Languages (ECML) of the Council of Europe (e-lang citizen project).
Catherine Martin
Catherine is a Lecturer Below the Bar in the TESOL/Applied Linguistics division of the School of Modern Languages & Applied Linguistics at UL. She teaches core modules in SLA and language pedagogy on the MA TESOL programme and lectures in TESOL to undergraduates at UL. She has also developed Academic Literacies modules to support International Postgraduate students in developing academic writing and study skills. Catherine also lectures in EMI and has developed online CPD courses in Writing for Publication and Curriculum development for International academics. She also teaches in the area of Language Advising/coaching to support language development in the workplace. She is supervising 5 PhD students researching topics in the area of ESP/EAP. She is currently the UL Co-PI in an Erasmus+ Capacity Building project to develop approaches to linguistic- and culture-sensitive science teaching.
Íde O'Sullivan
Dr Íde O’Sullivan is a Senior Educational Developer at the Centre for Transformative Learning at the University of Limerick (UL), where she is Curriculum Development Support Lead, steering the development of UL’s Integrated Curriculum Development Framework. Íde teaches curriculum design and leads three scholarship modules on the Graduate Diploma/MA in Teaching, Learning and Scholarship in Higher Education. From 2007 to 2019, Íde co-directed the Regional Writing Centre at UL. Her research focuses on curriculum design, professional development of academic staff, writing transfer, writing pedagogy and assessment.
Mark Ryan
Mark Ryan is a Research Assistant, tutor, and Ph.D. candidate at the University of Limerick, Ireland, where he is the recipient of a scholarship from the School of Modern Languages and Applied Linguistics. Mark specialises in the discourses and representations of gender- and sexual-minorities in the Irish context, and particularly in the linguistic and semiotic processes involved in this. Mark also has a keen interest in the internationalisation of higher education, both at a theoretical and policy level, and aims to integrate his expertise in equality, diversity and, inclusion into this field. Mark has spoken about his research at international conferences such as Sociolinguistics Symposium 23, University of Hong Kong. Mark is committed to improving LGBTI+ experiences in particular, and has also worked at the Directorate of Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion at Technological University Dublin, where he held a post as Senior Research Assistant. Mark’s most recent publication is a co-authored study on gender and public policy during the COVID-19 pandemic which examines how various social factors intersected to aggravate inequalities in Ireland during the pandemic. Within the context of TRIP, Mark is primarily working on PR3, at the macro and policy level, and is heavily involved in the design of the certification framework of TRIP.
Sarah Smail
Dr Sarah Smail is a researcher and tutor at the University of Limerick, specializing in sociolinguistics, with a focus on linguistic inequalities and ideologies in the semiotic landscape of Algeria. Her research explores the linguistic and semiotic processes in public spaces, particularly in relation to linguistic commodification and fetishism, examining how language representation shapes societal dynamics. Sarah’s research interests include semiotic landscaping in the context of clone-branding, the food industry, business, virtual landscapes, and the intersections of racism and intercultural communication. She also contributed to the TRIP project, where she was involved in designing a CPD course.