Natalie Harrower

Dr. Natalie Harrower is the Director of the Digital Repository of Ireland, located at the Royal Irish Academy. 

Recently, Dr. Harrower was appointed to the National Archives Advisory Committee (NAAC), and is a member of the OECD High Level Expert Group on Business Models for Data Repositories. She is on the Board of Directors for the Research Data Alliance's H2020-funded EU support activities, and she chairs the ALLEA E-Humanities Working Group. Harrower has worked to build DRI’s community profile and partnerships, and has been instrumental in securing grants for DRI from philanthropists (Atlantic Philanthropies), European funders (FP7, H2020), and Irish funders (SFI, Enterprise Ireland). She leads a number of leveraged projects for DRI, including the multiple award-winning Inspiring Ireland (www.inspiring-ireland.ie), and the Royal Irish Academy’s contributions to the collaborative DAH PhD programme. In 2014 Dr. Harrower established the international conference series DPASSH: Digital Preservation for the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities, and chaired its inaugural conference in June 2015. Previously, she was the DRI's Manager of Education and Outreach, where she initiated and delivered a broad education and training programme in digital preservation and related areas -- including digital humanities, digital archiving, digital curation, and linked data.

Prior to her appointment at the DRI, Dr. Harrower was a theatre and film scholar, specialising in Irish identity, politics, and historiography, as seen through the critical lens of contemporary Irish theatre and film. Before moving to Ireland to take up an appointment at Trinity College Dublin on an IRCHSS-funded Irish theatre research project, she was an Assistant Professor of Drama at Queen’s University (Canada). Prior to her appointment at Queen’s, she was a lecturer in theatre, film, and Celtic Studies at the University of Toronto. Dr. Harrower received her PhD in Drama from the University of Toronto and her MA in Political Science from York University. 

Recent Activities:

• Member, National Archives Advisory Council (NAAC) 2017-2022
• Programme Committee, PASIG 2017, Oxford
• Member, OECD Global Science Forum Expert Group, Business Models for Data Repositories project
• Member, Digital Preservation Coalition Advocacy and Communication Committee
• Chair, ALLEA E-Humanities Working Group (2016-)
• Member, Scientific Advisory Board, AGATE project
• Organising Committee Member, Open Repositories 2016
• Steering Committee, DARIAH Ireland
• Principal Investigator, Inspiring Ireland 1916
• Local Chair for RDA3, the Third Plenary of the Research Data Alliance, March 2014, Dublin
• Principal Investigator, DAH PhD Programme at the RIA
• Project Manager at DRI for the Social Repository of Ireland SFI TIDA project
• Co-Chair, Minitrack on Citizen Journalism and Social Media Archiving, 48th Annual HICSS conference (Jan 2015)
• Co-founder and Organising Committee Member for Discover Research Dublin, Dublin's first contribution to European Researchers Night (2013)
• Chair of the Organising Committee for Journalist for a Night, the Royal Irish Academy's contribution to Discover Research Dublin
• Secretariat for the ALLEA (All European Academies) international E-Humanities Working Group (2013-2015)
• Contributor to DARIAH's (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities) Virtual Competency Centre - Scholarly Content Management
• Associate Member of the Humanities and Digital Journalism group, Insight Centre for Data Analytics, Galway
• Co-Organiser and founding member of Hacks/Hackers Dublin