Dr Gail Baylis

Overview

Life Before Ulster

Before coming to UU Dr Gail Baylis completed a Foundation Course in Art at Cardiff Art College.  An interest in the importance of the visual in culture is a continuing thread that connects her teaching, research and publications.  She completed a BA Hons in English and D.Phil in English.

Her D.Phil, entitled ‘Literary Representations of London 1660-1760’ engages with the intersection between literary precedent and lived experience for literary expression in poetry, drama, the novel, polemical writing and social commentary of the period.

Later she completed an MA in Popular Culture (Open University) for which her dissertation focused on a series of carte de visite portraits of Welsh women mining workers.

Teaching

Gail has taught across a range of subject areas from English, Gender Studies, Media and Journalism.  Her field of interest is the visual and its significance for communication and memory.

Her research areas inform her teaching in terms of interdisciplinary approach for engagement with visual materials in culture.

She has supervised a number of PhDs on photography, both as written-only and with a practice component along with MA dissertation in Journalism and final year dissertations in Media and Journalism.

A research post on the pedagogy learning resulted in her producing a workshop series for wring skills and she holds a HEA Fellowship.

Research

Research interests include photographic theory and history, visual culture and gender studies.

Both research and publications focus on an interdisciplinary approach that combines photographic theory, visual studies, social history and memory.

She has published numerous chapters and articles in international peer reviewed journals on photography and Ireland and the importance of the visual in culture.  She is also a peer reviewer for several photographic and communication studies journals.

An underpinning of her research is archival study and an engagement with the materiality of images and the effects of digitalisation on an understanding of the agency of image communication

Civic Roles

Gail has contributed to a number of collaborative projects, including work with Belfast Exposed and the Ulster Museum.

She has given lunchtime talks at the Ulster Museum on the research.

She has been a member of the Irish Research Council Postgraduate Awards Board.