Eilís Nolan

In previous MA research, Eilís Nolan worked to establish a reflexive relationship between societal perceptions and fear of disease, and the representations of it in visual media. How and what visual media is created, and how an audience interacts with it, is often influenced by both intrinsic and socially informed beliefs surrounding disease and its representation.

The COVID-19 global pandemic has brought these hypotheses to the forefront of the cultural zeitgeist, with the pandemic effectively affecting all aspects of visual media production and engagement both during the period in which it was classed as a global crisis and beyond as a cultural trauma. This PhD research breaks these observations down into three primary subject areas; informational and broadcast media, digital culture, and film and television media. The aim of this research is to examine and conduct quantitative analysis on the ways in which COVID-19 affected these specified interdisciplinary areas of visual culture in the aftermath of the international health crisis.

Eilís is an assistant lecturer at Dún Laoghaire Institute Of Art, Design and Technology in Ireland. She gained her MA by Research in 2022 for research entitled Epidemics and Visual Media: An Examination of the Reflexive Relationship Between Perception of Disease and Visual Culture. She has presented her interdisciplinary research at conferences including The Irish Screen Studies Seminar in 2023, and The Conference of AG Animation 2024 in Denmark. She will present later this year at The Irish Screen Studies Seminar 2025 in University College Cork and Console-ing Passions in Georgia State University, USA. She also works as a scriptwriter and as a 2D animation professional.

This PhD research is co-funded by the Government of Ireland and the European Union through the ERDF Southern, Eastern & Midland Regional Programme 2021-2027.