Dr Dúnlaith Bird is Maître de langue at the École normale supérieure, Paris, where she teaches courses on Irish culture, history, and literature, travel writing, post-colonial and gender studies, and translation. She studied English and French at St. Catherine's College, Oxford University, and was awarded her doctorate by Oxford University in 2009. She has published articles on Isabelle Eberhardt and cross-dressing, women's travel writing and commerciality, and Samuel Beckett and textual interstices. In 2010 she organised the Beckett Between International Conference at the École normale supérieure, and has acted as Guest Editor for Samuel Beckett Today: Aujourd'hui. She is the 2008 winner of the Wallace Watson Award, and has twice retraced the route of Isabella Bird's Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (1880), filming a documentary on the topic with NHK in Japan in August 2011.