Marie-Annick Desplanques is originally from France and came to Folklore and Ethnology via a BA, MA and DEA in English Literature and Linguistics, from Univeriste de Haute Normandie. After spending a year working in England as a language teacher and another in Newfoundland teaching and doing fieldwork for her MA on the Folkltale tradition there, she obtained a scholarship to study Folklore and received her PhD from Memorial University of Newfoundland for her research on French Newfoundland women communicative traditions. She was subsequently awarded a post-doctoral fellowship from the Institute of Social and Economic Research in St John’s for a comparative study of Newfoundland and Irish contemporary women traditional musicians.She joined UCC in 1995 where she set up the Folklore and Ethnology Archive and was instrumental in establishing the Northside Folklore Project of which she was the Research Director until 2010. Her current research interests range from Urban Ethnology to Ethnomusicology, Oral History and the digitisation of multimedia folklore archive resources. She also lectures on Oral History in the Masters in Women Studies programme at UCC, together with historian Liz Steiner Scott and has done so since 2000.
Marie-Annick has also been actively involved in traditional music as a listener and occasional musician, concert organiser, and record producer. She is also a photographer.
