Michele Holmgren is an Associate Professor and has taught at Mount Royal since 2002.   She received her BA from the University of Victoria, her MA (Irish Writing) from Queen's University of Belfast, and her PhD from Western University. She specializes in early Canadian literature and nineteenth and twentieth-century Irish literature, with a focus on Irish diasporic writing. She was president of the Canadian Association for Irish Studies from 2012-2015 and is currently the general editor of the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies. She is the author of Canada to Ireland: Poetry, Politics, and the Shaping of Canadian Nationalism, 1788-1900 (McGill-Queen's UP, 2021).

Scholarly Interests:
Irish-Canadian literary history, Canadian Literary nationalism, early Canadian literature.

Teaching Statement: 
 "Only connect": I am interested in the ways that literature creates connection through empathy, through continuity in past and present, among cultures and communities.

Selected Publications:
Canada to Ireland Poetry, Politics, and the Shaping of Canadian Nationalism, 1788–1900 McGill-Queen's Press, 2021.

Holmgren, M. (2013). A Thorough Indian: Lord Edward Fitzgerald, Thomas Moore, Adam Kidd and Irish Identifications with Aboriginal Culture in Irish Literature. In. (G. Morton, & D. Wilson, Eds.), Irish and Scottish Encounters with Indigenous People (pp.171-194). Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press.

Holmgren, M. (2015) "Stranger No Longer": Recuperating Memories of Place from Present Amnesia in Al Purdy's "Grosse Isle”. Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, 39.1, 142-161.

Holmgren, (2012). "Ireland and England Will be Too Little For Me: The Canadian Letters of Lord Edward Fitzgerald in Thomas Moore's The Life and Death of Lord Edward Fitzgerald”. Canadian Literature, 213, 40-57.

"What My Irish Heritage Means to Me" presented on Irish Embassy launch of Irish Heritage Month 2023 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzuvPeWdV5Q&t=2423s

Selected Grants, Honours and Awards:
SSHRCC Aid to Scholarly Publication Grant for Canada to Ireland

Finalist, Gabrielle Roy Prize for best book of literary Criticism in English, 2022

Honourable Mention, Robert Rhodes Price for Literary Criticism, American Conference of Irish Studies