Margaret O' Callaghan graduated with a First Class Honours BA in History and English and an  MA from University College Dublin. Her MA thesis 'Language and Religion; the Quest for Identity in the Irish Free State, 1922-32' was prizewinning and she won a Laski Research Studentship to St John's College Cambridge where she did her Ph.D under the supervision of Professor Peter Clarke.  Her doctoral thesis ' Crime, Nationality and the Law; the Politics of Land in Late-Victorian Ireland'. A former Research Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge she has taught at the University of Cambridge and at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana.Her interests are in Irish political thought, the politics of Irish literature, British high politics, the politics of commemoration and memory, and modern Irish cultural and political history. She has published widely in all of these areas and has supervised over forty MA dissertations and seventeen doctoral dissertations.