Lori Meghan Gallagher is the Director of the Center for Irish Studies at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. She has served in that position since the Center opened in January 2003. 

 

As director, Gallagher oversees the Irish Studies academic program, which consists of an undergraduate minor program and a graduate concentration in the Master in Liberal Arts program, and the Ireland Study Abroad Program. The university offers five or six interdisciplinary Irish Studies courses each semester.

 

Gallagher is a fourth-generation Irish-American whose family immigrated to America in the 1860s from Donegal. They settled in New Mexico, where they became cattle ranchers. She received her undergraduate degrees in English and journalism as well as her Juris Doctorate degree from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. Lori was a member of Phi Beta Kappa as an undergraduate and the Editor-in-Chief of the New Mexico Law Review in law school. She received a postgraduate diploma in Anglo-Irish literature from Trinity College, Dublin on a Rotary Foundation scholarship.

 

Her career at the University of St. Thomas enables Gallagher to combine her Irish heritage and love of Irish literature, history, politics and culture with her legal background. She also is a director of The Irish Society, a local non-sectarian, non-partisan cultural group that was instrumental in the creation of the Center for Irish Studies at UST and that co-sponsors many Irish cultural events with the Center.