Please note that the software for IRIS cannot facilitate the correct spelling of my surname. Please use FitzPatrick.

Dr Elizabeth FitzPatrick is a senior lecturer (2007) in Archaeology. She received her PhD from Trinity College Dublin (1997). Before joining NUI, Galway in 1997 she worked with the Carroll Institute, London and with the Archaeological Survey of Ireland.

She is archaeology editor of Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy and a fellow of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland. She has recently been awarded a Fulbright Visiting Scholarship to Harvard (2012-13), where she will teach and write about the archaeology of Gaelic peoples. 
 

Her main research interests are Old World historical archaeology and the archaeology of Gaelic peoples with particular reference to their expressions of cultural and social identity in landscape, landholding and settlement and in everyday and specialised material culture. Her areas of investigation and those of her post-graduate student research team include historical landscape studies, cross-cultural dialogues between native and colonial society, materials and materiality among Gaelic peoples, settlement norms and nucleation in traditional polities, medieval assembly places and practices, the environment of Gaelic hereditary arts, and the medieval Irish  church in its European context.

Author and editor of six books and over forty articles, her recent publications include ‘Aughris headland’ for the 2nd edition of the Atlas of the Irish rural landscape (2011), the first special issue of Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy Section C on Domestic life in Ireland (2011), and ‘Native enclosed settlement and the problem of the Irish ring-fort’, published in Medieval Archaeology (2009).

She has lectured in international, national and regional contexts and has initiated and led collaborative interdisciplinary publication projects that are important to exploring the identity of Ireland.

Linking her research directly to her undergraduate teaching and to civic engagement, she has directed twenty weeks of Royal Irish Academy sponsored archaeological excavation as summer field schools for students (2001-10). She has successfully supervised five PhDs, eight M.Litts and six MAs to completion and assisted six students to attain IRCHSS scholarships. She currently supervises six PhDs and one MA student.