Rosemary received her bachelor's degree in history and Germanic studies at Trinity College Dublin in 1987. For many years she was a full-time chef in Dublin before returning to academia, obtaining an M.Phil. in linguistics at Trinity in 1995, a field in which she remained active for the rest of her life. She obtained her PhD from Radboud University in Nijmegen in 2005. A phonetician by training, her recent research focused on accents, as evidenced in her UCU Accent Project and the Sprekend Nederland project, which captured national attention in the last year of her life.
Universally regarded by her colleagues as an outsized personality, Rosemary was a leading light in college life. Above all, she was a dedicated and talented tutor and teacher whose combination of high standards, humour, storytelling and encouragement deeply impacted the lives of many of her students. Rosemary strongly believed that each story has a lesson to teach; storytelling is a valued skill that is used in various contexts - as tool for partnership brokering or conflict resolution.
