Fergal Lenehan is adjunct Professor (ausserplanmäßger Professor) at the Friedrich-Schiller-University of Jena, in Germany. He received a BA and an MA from University College Dublin, Ireland, and a PhD from the University of Leipzig, Germany.
He also completed the German Habilitation – the formal, second PhD which allows you to officially become a Professor – at the Friedrich-Schiller-University of Jena. He is also journalistically active and has written for the Dublin Review of Books and The Currency, among other publications.
He has had a varied research profile, but intercultural questions have remained central. He has written a monograph on the intellectual history of the European idea, Intellectuals and Europe: Imagining a Europe of the Regions in Twentieth Century Germany, Britain and Ireland (2014), and a monograph on German depictions of Ireland, Stereotypes, Ideology and Foreign Correspondents: German Media Representations of Ireland, 1946-2010 (2016).
In recent years, he has been a central figure in the research co-operative ReDICo: Researching Digital Interculturality Co-operatively. As part of ReDICo he has been co-editor of a number of open-access publications dealing, theoretically and empirically, with the topic of digital interculturality. These include a special issue of the journal Interculture Journal on Cyber-Utopia / Dystopia? Digital Interculturality between Cosmopolitan and Authoritarian Currents (2022), and the edited volumes: Language and Interculturality in the Digital World (2024), Lifewide Learning in Postdigital Societies (2024), and Reimagining Digital Cosmopolitanism (2025). He is also co-editor, with Luisa Conti, Roman Lietz and Milene Mendes de Oliviera, of the book series Studies in Digital Interculturality. ReDICo has also developed educasts, a podcast series, and the scholarly platform, the ReDICo-Hub. He recently published the article Examining realised and unrealised contacts: theoretical thoughts on digital interculturality (2024) in the journal Language and Intercultural Communication.
Work for CID:
Fergal Lenehan has written a guest post for the Center, The Need for a Cosmopolitan Perspective, as well as writing KC114: Digital cosmopolitanism, and then translating it into German.
Center for Intercultural Dialogue 