We are delighted to confirm the keynote and plenary sessions for the 32nd International Conference of Europeanists in Dublin!
Keynote Speaker:
We are excited to announce Judge Síofra O’Leary as the keynote speaker for the 32nd International Conference of Europeanists! Judge O’Leary’s lecture is titled, “Tales of European Rupture and Resilience.” The lecture will take place at 5:45pm on June 16, 2026, at UCD. The keynote lecture will be followed by the presidential reception.
Síofra O’Leary is a former Judge and President of the European Court of Human Rights (2015 – 2024). While at the European Court she served as President of Section V, Vice-President and as the Court’s 17th President, the first woman to be elected to this position.Prior to joining the European Court of Human Rights, she worked for almost two decades at the Court of Justice of the European Union in both judicial and administrative capacities.
In 2025-2026, Síofra O’Leary will attend New York University (NYU) as a Hauser/Remarque Global Fellow.
She is also a Full Adjunct Professor at University College Dublin (UCD) and a Visiting Professor at the College of Europe (Bruges) and Instituto de Empresa (IE) in Madrid. She has served on the Editorial Board of the Common Market Law Review and is now a member of its Advisory Board and a Vice-President of the Irish Centre for European Law. She is also a member of the Society of Legal Scholars and is on the board of several national and European periodicals.
Síofra O’Leary is an Honorary Bencher of the Honorable Society of King’s Inns, Dublin and of Lincoln’s Inn, London, an Honorary Fellow of Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge and a recipient of an LLD h.c. from the University of Edinburgh. In 2024, UCD conferred on her the Ulysses Medal in recognition of her legal work and European service.
A graduate of University College Dublin (BCL) and a postgraduate of the European University Institute (PhD), Dr. O’Leary was previously the Assistant Director for the Centre of European Legal Studies at the University of Cambridge, a Fellow of Emmanuel College, a Visiting Fellow at the Faculty of Law, University College Dublin, a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Cádiz, Spain and a Research Associate at the Institute for Public Policy Research in London.
Síofra O’Leary is the author of two books entitled The Evolving Concept of Community Citizenship (Kluwer, 1996) and Employment Law at the European Court of Justice (Hart Publishing, 2001) and has published numerous articles in academic journals and legal monographs on the protection of fundamental rights in EU law and under the ECHR, EU employment law, the free movement of persons and services and EU citizenship generally.
Plenary Sessions:
June 17, 2026 from 2-3:30pm: Plenary Roundtable: “Ireland, Europe, and the Changing Geopolitics of Peace and Security” — sponsored by the Irish Association for Contemporary European Studies
Over the past five decades, Ireland has navigated profound shifts in its international orientation, balancing a long-standing tradition of neutrality with deepening engagement in European and global governance. This plenary explores how Ireland’s foreign, defence, and development policies have evolved in response to changing international dynamics—from early adaptation to European integration to contemporary debates around human security, defence against potential regional threats (e.g., Russia), peacekeeping, and global
development.
As international policy agendas increasingly blur the lines between security and development, Ireland offers a distinctive case. Its Defence Forces have maintained a strong tradition of engagement with UN peacekeeping, while Irish Aid has earned a global reputation for poverty-focused, principled development. At the same time, EU membership has reshaped Ireland’s foreign policy institutions, practices, and priorities, generating ongoing reflection on questions of sovereignty, solidarity, and strategic autonomy. Among others, this is reflected in
the country’s active participation in CSDP civilian missions and military operations but cautious engagement with PESCO and other initiatives to develop the EU’s defence industrial base.
Bringing together scholars and practitioners, the plenary examines Ireland’s contribution to, and negotiation of, the evolving European and international order. It asks how a small state with a strategic orientation rooted in military neutrality, and multilateralism can help shape the future of peacebuilding, security, defence and development cooperation in an era of geopolitical crisis, instability and uncertainty.
Speakers
Prof. Ben Tonra (UCD)
Prof. John O’Brennan (NUI Maynooth)
Dr Ken McDonagh (DCU)
Prof. Ana Juncos (Bristol University)
Prof. Brigid Laffan (EUI)
Chaired by Dr Giada Lagana (Cardiff University)
June 18 from 9-10:30am, JCMS Annual Lecture, “Gender quality contested: institutional responses to anti-gender politics in parliament and feminist democratic innovations”
Speaker: Emanuela Lombardi (Scuola Normale Superiore)
Chaired by Roberta Guerrina (University of Bristol)
Gender equality is increasingly contested in parliaments across Europe, with the rise of political parties and movements that actively oppose feminist politics and the rights of women, LGBTIQ+, and Black people, – a phenomenon known in the literature as anti-gender or anti-equality politics. Research on far-right and anti-gender politics in institutional settings has exposed the challenges they pose for liberal democracy and analysed their strategies, their discourse and their effects in terms of backsliding in equality policy and democracy as well as the exclusion of women, Black and LGBTIQ+ and other minoritised actors from the public arena. To spread their exclusionary projects, anti-gender actors tap into liberal democracy’s undelivered promises of equality and inclusion. The challenge of anti-gender politics exposes the extent to which democracies are in need of ongoing democratization in each societal domain and in search of political projects capable of reimagining more inclusive and democratic societies. Can feminist politics play a role in such societal democratisation? Research on feminist institutional responses to anti-gender politics in parliamentary contexts across Europe developed within the Horizon-Europe CCINDLE project (Co-Creating Inclusive Intersectional Democratic Spaces Across Europe) investigates the potential of feminist politics to protect democratic rights of women and minorities and to innovate democracies through more inclusionary societal practices.
Speaker bio
Emanuela Lombardo is Professor of Political Science. Her main research lines are gender equality policies, democracy and feminist politics, intersectionality, anti-gender politics and feminist response, in the context of the European Union and Southern Europe. After her PhD at the University of Reading (UK), she conducted research and teaching at the universities of Radboud (Netherlands), Zaragoza and Complutense de Madrid (Spain). In the latter, she enjoyed the positions of Ramón y Cajal researcher and associate and full professor. In the area of gender equality policies she has developed research in European projects such as the Horizon Europe CCINDLE on democracy and feminism, QUING (Quality in Gender Equality Policies), TARGET (Transnational Gender Equity Training) and MAGEEQ (Mainstreaming Gender Equality in Europe). The Spanish Ministry of Research has awarded her the recognition of an ‘outstanding research trajectory’ in relation to the quality of publications and scientific activities. She was visiting professor at the universities of Madison-Wisconsin, Helsinki, Antwerp, Tampere and Aalborg, as well as at the Scuola Normale Superiore and the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. She was coordinator of the evaluation of research projects on gender in the panel of social science of Spain’s National Research Agency.
Biography of Lecture Chair
Roberta Guerrina is Professor of Politics at the University of Bristol, UK. She is one of the Editors-in-Chief of JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies. Her work examines how gender norms and structures influence EU politics and policies. At the moment, she is researching the gendered impact of crisis, Brexit and Covid-19; gender and leadership; gender mainstreaming in foreign and security policy; and feminist research methodologies.
Sponsored Lectures:
JCMS
June 16, 2026, 4-5:30pm: JCMS Annual Review Lecture: “Loneliness in Times of War: The European Union and the Executive Power’s Deficit.”
Speaker: Sergio Fabbrini (Luiss Guido Carli).
The European Union (EU) is facing the most dramatic period of her eighty-years life. She is facing a context of multiple wars without being able to rely on American protection. A four-years long war is fought at her eastern border (Ukraine), a war has started in Iran, and a war has never ended in Gaza. All these wars are affecting the military and economic security of the EU precisely because Trump’s America does no longer guarantee herr. Trump’s America has converted to the great power politics already pursued by Russia’s Putin. While America and Russia, two nationalistic powers, are challenging the EU from outside, nationalistic parties and leaders are challenging the EU from inside, weakening her capacity to aggregate around a common view. Not only divisions between states, but mainly her governance structure conjures to EU political weakness. Institutionally, the EU is not fit for walking alone in the new international disorder due to her executive power’s deficit. An inadequacy that recalls the limits of the main theories of European integration, whose epistemology has been indifferent to the conceptualization of a “government” for the EU. Those theories were elaborated with reference to an EU acting as a normative power, in the context of a stable international liberal order, not forced to make existential decisions. This favorable condition is now over, domestically and internationally. Facing two revisionist powers, as Trump’s America and Putin’s Russia that are rocking the liberal international order, the EU is pressured to go beyond her normative identity of the past. A change that inevitably implies to going beyond also the main theories of European integration. From here, the proposal to bring back federalism as the political theory that could conciliate governmental capacity and democratic legitimacy in unions of states. This would require a strategy of constitutional differentiation of the EU, with a core organized according to the federal union’s model. Loneliness in times of war has raised a structural challenge to the EU: acquire a governmental capacity to survive.
Sergio Fabbrini is Professor Emeritus of Political Science and International Relations and Intesa Sanpaolo Chair on European Governance at the Luiss Guido Carli in Rome. He had the Pierre Keller Chair at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and he was a Recurrent Visiting Professor at UC Berkeley. He was Jemolo Fellow at the Nuffield College, Oxford University and Jean Monnet Chair Professor at the Robert Schuman Center for Advanced Studies, European University Institute in Florence. He lectured in several international universities and won several prizes. He published twenty-two books, two co-authored books and twenty edited or co-edited books or journals’ special issues, and several hundred scientific articles and essays in seven languages in the most important peer-reviewed international journals. His recent publications in English include: A Federalist Alternative for European Governance: The European Union in Hard Times (Cambridge University Press 2025); Europe’s Future: Decoupling and Reforming, (Cambridge University Press, 2019); Which European Union? Europe After the Euro Crisis, (Cambridge University Press, 2015); Compound Democracies: Why the United States and Europe Are Becoming Similar (Oxford University Press, 2010, second and revised edition); America and Its Critics: Vices and Virtues of the Democratic Hyper-power (Cambridge, Polity Press, 2008). The most recent publications in Italian are: Tsunami Trump. Il nazionalismo americano e l’Europa (Milano, Edizione Sole 24 Ore, 2026) and Nazionalismo 2.0. La sfida sovranista all’Europa integrata (Milano, Mondadori Università, 2025). He is the Sunday’s political editor of the financial daily Il Sole 24 Ore.
IACES
June 17, 2026 from 11:00-12:30pm: “EU Policies and Politics at a Time of Crisis”
Giada Lagana (Cardiff University): “Bridging the Gap – Reconciliation and the Limits of High Politics in Post-Agreement Northern Ireland”
Shamsoddin Shariati (Maynooth University) and John O’Brennan (Maynooth University) “Navigating Uncertainty: A Qualitative Comparative Analysis of COVID-19 Pandemic Responses in Europe”
Rachel Minto (Cardiff University) and Dan Wincott (Cardiff University), The de-Europeanisation of UK Civil Society Organisations Post-Brexit
Evans Fanoulis (University of Galway) and Kyriakos Revelas (European External Action Service), Shifts in EU’s security and defence: Sustainable? Desirable?
June 17, 4-5:30pm: Early Career Panel “The Uk and European Communities: Regional and External Challenges of Integration.”
Margherita Capannoli (University of Bologna), “The United Kingdom’s Accession Process to the EEC in the 1960s: an Italian Perspective”
Francesco Massardo (University of Genoa), “Sunningdale and the special status of Northern Ireland during the British and Irish accession to the EEC, 1974-1975”
Eleonora Cappa (University of Turin), “From Westminster to Strasbourg: British Conservative MEPs and the EEC’s Response to Apartheid, 1977–1986”
Undergraduate Symposium
June 16, 2026 from 2-3:30pm:
Emma Dalla Costa (Cornell University), “Urban Borders of Belonging and Exclusion”
Lillian Carson (University of Southern Maine), “Aging Population, Immigration Policies In Italy and Germany and Their Economic Effects”
June 17, 2026 from 4-5:30pm
Luka Danelia (Tbilisi State University), “Georgia’s Dangerous Gamble: Understanding Georgia’s Alignment with Illiberal Powers”
Olivia Irwin-Pokorny (Middlebury College), “Power of the Plenum: Manifestation of Inclusion and Unity through Deliberative Democratic Organizing within Contemporary Serbian Student Protests”
Natalie Gildea (University of Notre Dame) “Critical ChangeLab: Promoting agency through collective memory and narrative framing in civic education workshops across Ireland”
Julia Xiao (Cornell University), “A Nation of Immigrants? Comparative Data Questions an American Narrative”
June 18, 2026, 4-5:30pm
Bernadette LaForte (University of Southern Maine), “The Nuclear Symbiosis of France and the Broader European Union”
Imrhane Leo Djonouma (University of Southern Maine), “Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum: Macron and Europe’s Quest for Collective Defense”
Dáire Finnegan (University College Dublin), “A Critical Analysis of the Draghi Report”