CASCADE Research Supervisors

University College Cork

James O’Sullivan has a track record in cultural analytics, specialising in text. He has published several significant papers on the use of stylometry in the study of literature. He is currently the Irish lead investigator for C21 Editions, exploring born-digital and machine-assisted approaches to scholarly editing. O’Sullivan is also the chair and lead investigator for CASCADE.

Órla Murphy is an expert in digital approaches to cultural heritage and textual production in contemporary culture. She is National Coordinator of the Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities, National Representative and vice chair on the Scientific Committee of CoST-EU; Co-operation in Science and Technology, and National Representative of the Social Science and Humanities Strategy Working Group of the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures.

Rosane Minghim is an expert in human-centric Machine Learning and AI at the School of Computer Science and Information Technology, University College Cork. Her research regards Data Visualization, Data Science and human-centric Machine Learning and AI, as well as Applications, imprinting a multi-disciplinary and cross-disciplinary outlook to her work. She interacts with researchers and professionals in diverse data analytics applications, such as biology, imaging applications, document and cultural analytics, soundscape ecology, medical records, social networks, etc..

Dr Clíona Ó Gallchoir is a Senior Lecturer in English at University College Cork. Her research interests are in eighteenth and nineteenth-century literature, focusing especially on Irish writing, women’s writing, and constructions of gender and sexuality. She also researches and publishes on children’s literature.

University of Helsinki


Mikko Tolonen is a historian specialising in intellectual history, the history of ideas, and conceptual change.

Eetu Mäkelä is a computer scientist specialising in Machine Learning, linked data, information retrieval and algorithm development in the domain of digital humanities (specifically, large corpora).

Katholieke Universiteit Leuven

Dirk Speelman is Professor of Corpus Linguistics and Quantitative Linguistic Methodology. His main research interest lies in the fields of corpus linguistics, computational lexicology and variational linguistics in general. Much of his work focuses on methodology and on the application of statistical and other quantitative methods to the study of language.

Dirk Geeraerts is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and founder of the research unit Quantitative Lexicology and Variationist Linguistics. His main research interests involve the overlapping fields of lexical semantics and lexicology, with a specific descriptive interest in social variation, a strong methodological commitment to corpus analysis, and a theoretical background in Cognitive Linguistics.

Stefano De Pascale is an assistant professor of Italian linguistics at Vrije Universiteit Brussel and a postdoctoral researcher at QLVL, KU Leuven, where he is involved in the international project Change is Key!. His research is at the intersection of sociolinguistics, cognitive linguistics, and corpus linguistics, with an emphasis on using distributional semantics to study lexical and semantic variation and change.

Dr. Kris Heylen is a guest lecturer in lexicography, lexicology and terminology at KU Leuven and an affiliated research fellow at the research group Quantitative Lexicology and Variational Linguistics.  His research focuses on the corpus-based, statistical modelling of lexical semantics and lexical variation. He is also a senior researcher at the Instituut voor de Nederlandse Taal (Dutch Language Institute, Leiden – The Netherlands) where he coordinates the R&D projects in computational lexicography, terminology and applied linguistics for modern Dutch.

Universität des Saarlandes

Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb is an Associate Professor/Lecturer in  English Linguistics and Corpus linguistics and an expert on text mining and data analytics for research questions from sociolinguistics, register/language variation as well as change in language use. She is Principal Investigator of the project Information Density in English Scientific Writing: A Diachronic Perspective in the Information Density and Linguistic Encoding collaborative research centre

University of Sheffield

Seth Mehl is Lecturer in Digital Humanities, and formerly researcher on Linguistic DNA, with expertise in semantics, historical linguistics, and corpus linguistics. His projects have included Corpus-Directed Discourse Analysis of discourses around plastic packaging; and semi-automated corpus semantic analysis of lexicographical sub-senses with the Oxford English Dictionary.

Susan Fitzmaurice is Chair of English Language and an expert on the history of the English language, combining methodological perspectives provided by historical pragmatics and historical sociolinguistics with computational linguistics and digital technologies. She was the lead investigator of the large, multi-institutional project, Linguistic DNA: Modelling concepts and semantic change in English 1500–1800.

Michael Pidd is Director of the Digital Humanities Institute, providing expertise in information retrieval and digital humanities as well as 30 years’ experience in management and delivery of multi-institutional technology projects in the arts and humanities. He was co-lead of Linguistic DNA and he is currently the UK lead investigator of C21 Editions, exploring born-digital and machine-assisted approaches to scholarly editing.

CASCADE Research Support Officer

Emer Yip is an arts manager, curator and freelance project manager based in Cork city. A graduate of University of Galway (English & Archaeology) and UCC (Computer Science & Project Management),  Emer worked as a field archaeologist and site photographer before relocating to San Francisco, California where she co-founded an artist collective and cultural venue in the city. Emer has held senior administrative roles with several Irish arts organisations including Sample-Studios, Cork International Film Festival, Corcadorca Theatre Company and STAMP Festival of Creativity, and was the recipient of an Arts Council Agility Award for visual art in 2021 and currently curates and produces the Cork International Film Festival culinary cinema strand.