Dr Connie Kelleher

National Monuments Service

Themes of special interest – Management and Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage

Connie Kelleher is senior archaeologist with the National Monuments Service (NMS) in the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage, Ireland. Connie is senior manager of the Underwater Archaeology Unit and senior archaeological advisor for the World Heritage site of Sceilg Mhichíl. She has 25-years of experience in the field of archaeology. As a commercially trained underwater archaeologist she has directed numerous underwater projects on a variety of archaeological sites in both the marine and freshwater environments.

Connie is a graduate of University College Cork (UCC) with an MA in maritime archaeology and a PhD from Trinity College Dublin, and is visiting lecturer in underwater archaeology in the Archaeology Department, UCC. She has published widely in peer reviewed journals and chapters in books on her work on shipwrecks and underwater archaeological projects, on management, protection and legislative provisions, and on the history and archaeology of piracy in the North Atlantic, which was the focus of her doctoral thesis. She has co-authored RMS Lusitania: The Story of a Wreck (with F. Moore, K. Brady, C. McKeon & I. Lawler, Govt. Stationary Office, 2019) and The Alliance of Pirates: Ireland and Atlantic Piracy in the early seventeenth century (Kelleher; Cork University Press, 2020).

A past council member of the Royal Society of Antiquaries in Ireland (RSAI) and former chair of the Irish Post-Medieval Archaeology Group (IPMAG), she currently sits on the board of the International Advisory Council on Underwater Archaeology (ACUA).