Stephanie O'Donohoe

Dip Advanced Marketing Techniques (Dublin); BSc (Trinity College, Dublin); PhD (Edinburgh).

I worked in the Irish alcohol industry on graduation, with responsibilities for marketing research, new product development and point-of-sale material. I completed my PhD at Edinburgh exploring young adults' experiences of advertising.

I am interpretive consumer researcher, with a longstanding interest in theories and practices of advertising consumption. This interest has expanded to encompass advertising production as well as consumption, and children's relationship with advertising and marketing communications. I am currently collaborating with several colleagues on advertising-related projects.

My second main area of interest concerns consumers' interactions with the marketplace as their family circumstances change. My primary concern here is with  consumption experiences in relation to bereavement, and I have a longstanding research collaboration in this area with Professor Darach Turley, Dublin City University. Much of my current work in this area focuses on books and bereavement - on grief memoirs as a lens on bereavement and consumption experiences during bereavement, and also on the role of fiction in sensemaking among bereaved people.  Recent work has also explored consumption experiences in the transition to motherhood. I am part of the VOICE Group, an international research team (spanning UK, USA, Denmark and Ireland) exploring this area, and I was a co-organiser of the ESRC Motherhoods, Markets and Consumption seminar series.

Finally, I am involved in several joint projects exploring consumption practices among young people, particularly at points of transition.