English, Media and Creative Arts

Dr Don Duncan is a journalist, filmmaker, and academic who lectures in Journalism and Media (above the bar) in the School of English, Media and Creative Arts. He joined Ollscoil na Gaillimhe/University of Galway in 2023 from Queen's University Belfast.  

As a journalist and documentarian, Dr Duncan has significant international correspondence experience from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Afghanistan, the Emirates, east Asia, North America and across Europe for clients including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, Foreign Policy, Le Monde Diplomatique, BBC, NPR, RTÉ, among others.

As a filmmaker, he has written and directed films - in English and in French - that have been screened at some 30 festivals internationally and has picked up a half dozen prizes. He has also been an active member of an 8mm and 16mm film collective, shooting, developing and editing in analogue formats.

He has written and performed experimental spoken-word/live documentary hybrids to an international audiences at the HearSay International Audio Festival and through the Irish language at the Liú Lúnasa fringe festival in Belfast.
 
As a media trainer and teacher, he has worked across Africa, the Middle East, and Asia with BBC Media Action, Thomson Reuters Foundation, and the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR),  delivering training, mentorship and management to diverse media projects and broadcasters.
 
Dr Duncan's research interests include: media practice and how it can intersect with language and multilingualism; folklore and oral history; marginalised identity; voice and agency. Additionally, he is interested in factual animation, sound, sound design and non-verbal media components as vectors of meaning making.

He has published in a variety of peer-reviewed journals and is the co-editor of an anthology of Irish writing: Opulent Syntax (2023). Since 2019, he has been the Principle Investigator of an ongoing factual animation project called "Ulster Gaeilge: It's Yours Too", which explores ways to represent and articulate various experiences of discovering, engaging with, and internalising the Irish language among Protestants and Unionists in East Belfast. This project is run in conjunction with the East Belfast NGO 'Turas' and its founder Linda Ervine, and has received funding from Foras na Gaeilge, the Northern Ireland Executive, Urban Villages, and the Community Relations Committee.

In 2021, Dr Duncan led a practice-based project exploring political disenfranchisement and youth voice in Northern Ireland in relation to climate change. The practice-as-research project - "Civil Rights, Climate Wrongs" - involved master's students as co-investigators, exploring how animation can be used to express specific emotions and political states in the context of youth and climate change in Northern Ireland. Funded by the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commissions (NIHRC).

He teaches practice-based subjects (such as journalism, documentary craft, podcasting, and experimental media practice) as well as theory-based subjects in the areas of: politics and power; language & identity; minorities, minority rights and visibility; environment and ecology; folklore; and migration. He has a particular interest in inter-disciplinary teaching, such as "Public CoLab", a co-taught practice focussed module he has run) with the School of Architecture at Queen's University Belfast. Dr Duncan is also interested in Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL), such as "Expressing a Youth Perspective on Climate Damage" - a live, factual magazine TV show his MA students produced in collaboration MA students at Columbia University (New York).

Dr Duncan holds a PhD from the University of East Anglia; master's degrees in politics and journalism from Columbia University in New York; and a bachelor's degree in literature from Trinity College Dublin. In 2016, he graduated with an MA in Film Directing from INSAS, the Belgian state film school. He holds a PGCHET diploma from Queen's University Belfast. He speaks fluent French and Gaeilge as well as intermediate Arabic and Portuguese.

www.donduncan.net