One-day interdisciplinary event exploring aviation’s influence on Irish society - design, politics, culture and innovation.

Shifting Skies: influences of and on Irish aviation is a one-day, interdisciplinary symposium that will explore the impact and influence of aviation on Irish society.

Speakers will address a wide range of issues relating to design and manufacturing, architecture, politics, environmentalism, gastronomy, economics, literature, international relations, and engineering. The symposium complements the exhibition Come Fly With Me: Aviation, tourism and Irish design, currently running at the National Print Museum until 17 December 2026.

Speakers and presenters include:

Linda King: Transforming Irish Identity: aviation, tourism and design modernisation

Candace White: Dublin Airport as Utopian Dream: Glamour, Modernity, Style

Keith McLoughlin: ‘A grand way to shoot home from Paris on Saturday afternoon’: Concorde comes to Ireland

Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire: Feasting in the ambience of AvGas and shining propellers: Fine Dining at Irish Airports

Michael Kennedy: Statecraft and sovereignty in the skies. Aviation strategies, geopolitics, and Irish foreign policy: 1919-58

Sara Donaldson: Aer Lingus Uniforms in the 1950s and 1960s: a Golden Age for Irish Fashion and Textiles

Siobhan Tiernan: The Evolution of Irish Airline Business Models

Luke Gibbons: Flights of the Imagination: Aerial Gothic in Irish Fiction

[Full detailed programme to follow.]

Speaker biographies

Sara Donaldson

Sara Donaldson is a PhD Researcher at Belfast School of Art, Ulster University. She was a awarded a Northern Bridge Consortium Scholarship from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) to support her doctoral research into her family’s firm, C.H. Bates & Co, which operated from Kilmainham Mills, Dublin as Ireland’s only independent cloth finishing firm. Bates finished tweed for Avoca Handweavers, Botany, Magee, McNutt and Molloy, and Dublin’s leading couture salons and tailoring establishments. Sara lectures in the History of Art, and Design and Fashion at Griffith College Dublin, and writes and lectures for the National Gallery of Ireland.

Luke Gibbons

Luke Gibbons has taught as Professor of Irish Studies at Maynooth University and the University of Notre Dame. His most recent book is James Joyce and the Irish Revolution (2023)

Michael Kennedy

Dr Michael Kennedy is the Executive Editor of the Royal Irish Academy’s Documents on Irish Foreign Policy Research Programme. For over thirty years he has researched and published widely on Irish diplomatic history, covering broad themes such as Ireland’s membership of the League of Nations and the United Nations, cross border relations in Ireland and more focussed areas including Ireland’s second world war neutrality, Ireland’s relationship with Japan, and the military and diplomatic history of Ireland’s involvement in UN peacekeeping in Congo. He regularly appears on tv and radio discussing modern Irish history, and he is an active public historian.

Linda King

Dr Linda King is a cultural historian, curator and broadcaster specialising in interdisciplinary research. She sits on the Historical Studies Committee of the Royal Irish Academy (2022-) and sat on the Board of the National Museum of Ireland (2018-22). She has published widely on Irish design, authoring the first comprehensive surveys in this field (some for the RIA). Her PhD analysed the advertising output of Aer Lingus in the 1950s and 1960s, using posters to demonstrate the seismic impact of the company on Ireland’s socio-economic development. She is Senior Lecturer in Design and Visual Culture in IADT.

Mairtín Mac Con Iomaire

Dr Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire is Co-PI at the Technological University Dublin Centre for Irish Studies. He is co-founder and chair of the biennial Dublin Gastronomy Symposium and former chair of the Masters in Gastronomy and Food Studies in TU Dublin. He has co-edited several books and journals, most notably Irish Food History: A Companion (Royal Irish Academy; EUt+ Academic Press, 2024) which was awarded the best culinary history book in the world for 2024. In 2025, Máirtín was awarded his second PhD for a thesis titled ‘Championing Food Studies within the Field of Irish Studies: An Serendipitous Autoethnographic Journey’.

Keith McLoughlin

Dr Keith Mc Loughlin is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Bristol. A graduate of University College Dublin, he is a historian of technology and his previous publications include The British Left and the Defence Economy, which was published by Manchester University Press. He is currently working on a social history of Concorde with a focus on Bristol, which he has titled Supersonic City.

Siobhán Tiernan

Siobhan Tiernan was awarded her PhD from the University of Limerick in 1995. Her thesis was entitled 'From Bureaucratic to Network Organisation - Organisational Change and the Outcomes at Team Aer Lingus'. Siobhan Tiernan holds an MSc

Description supplied by the event organiser.