Conor Daly

Visting Research Fellow

Email: dalyc27@tcd.ie

Conor Daly graduated from Trinity College with a BA (Joint Honours) in Russian and Ancient Greek and a Postgraduate Diploma in Theoretical Linguistics.  He has an MA and PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of California, Berkeley. 

Conor has been a member of the Department of Russian and Slavonic Studies at Trinity College Dublin since 2019. He has lectured and tutored on modules in Central and East European Area Studies, translation studies, literature and film.

He was an organiser and presenter of the annual public lecture series on “Understanding Europe’s East” which ran during Trinity term from 2023 to 2025.

Doctoral dissertation (1991): Linguistic Change and Cultural Paradigms: The Development of Russian Scholarly Prose (18th-20th Centuries). Thesis supervisor: Boris M. Gasparov.

Research interests include:

• Language death and language contact: notably the history of the Russian language in Alaska.  
• Jewish studies:  Conor's translations of works by Lev Levanda, Vladimir Zhabotinsky and Buki Ben Yogli were published in 2022 as part of The Feuilleton Project, a collaboration between scholars at the University of Michigan, Ohio State University and Michigan State University. 
• Contemporary politics and cultural history of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus: Conor is a regular contributor on Eastern European affairs for Raidió na Gaeltachta; he has chaired sessions on Russia and Ukraine at the MacGill Summer School (Glenties, Co. Donegal), including ‘The Future Direction of Russia’ (2022) and ‘When will the war in Ukraine end?’ (2023)

Selected recent publications:
• Article ‘Cogadh fuar agus te i litríocht na hÚcráine’ published in the journal Comhar in October 2024;
• Review of Simon Franklin The Russian Graphosphere, 1450–1850 (2019) published in the journal Linguistic Landscape Vol. 11:1 (2025), pp. 103-105.

Awards:
In August 2024 Conor was awarded the Hubert Butler Essay prize for 2024: “Daly‘s essay probes the way that memories of tyranny and oppression shape reactions to the present as well as the past, brought into focus by the all too brief re-set of the Gorbachev years. In conclusion, he skewers the misuses of history in contemporary Russia and the state of ‘memory wars’ in the Russian public sphere.” (Roy Foster, Chair of judging panel)