Elaine Sisson is a cultural historian who has published widely on the revolutionary period in Ireland and, more recently, on modernity and counter-culture in the Free State. She is a Senior Lecturer in Visual Culture, the Academic Lead for the Creative Futures Academy in IADT, and the Design Lead for the strategic project ELEVATE. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, UK and was awarded a Jinty Nelson Teaching Fellowship from the Society earlier this year. She has published widely on the cultural history of the Irish revolutionary period including her first book Pearse’s Patriots: The Cult of Boyhood at St. Enda’s (Cork UP, 2004) and with Linda King, Ireland, Design and Visual Culture: Negotiating Modernity 1922-1992 (Cork UP), 2011. She has served as an expert member of the Gate Theatre Research Network and with Siobhán O’Gorman and Ian Walsh was co-editor of: ‘The Gate Theatre: Staging Europe in Ireland’ for the journal Review of Irish Studies in Europe (2021). She has co-edited a special edition of the journal Éire-Ireland with Róisín Kennedy titled ‘Ireland in Transition: Visual Culture, Technology, and Modernity in the Free State’ due for publication in Autumn 2025. Her current book Performing Modernity: Culture, Experiment and the Free State is with Bloomsbury/Methuen and will be published in January 2026.