Rachel Fehily

Rachel Fehily is a Visiting Doctoral Student at Wolfson College, University of Oxford (Trinity Term 2026). From Dublin, she is based at University College Dublin, where her research is funded by a Government of Ireland Postgraduate Research Scholarship from Research Ireland. She lectures nationally and internationally and teaches an interdisciplinary module, Literature and Justice, in UCD's School of English.

Her PhD, Adoption, An Interdisciplinary Reframing: Memoir, Legality and Multi-racialism, takes the form of a personal memoir: Belonging in Baggotonia and an exegetical reflection on the memoir-making process. The book explores growing up mixed-race and adopted in a literary quarter of Dublin, in a family of six adopted children, three white Irish, three mixed-race, and one accidental biological child. It excavates the Ireland that produced her identity: the Catholic Church, the adoption system, de Valera's postcolonial ambitions, and the South African Indian medical student her birth mother met in 1960s Dublin, there, in part, because Dev invited him.

Before pivoting to writing and academia, Rachel practised as a barrister for over twenty years in the areas of Criminal, Family and Tort Law, Redress and Mediation. She holds a BA from Trinity College Dublin, a BL from The King's Inns, and an MA in Drama and Performance Studies from UCD.