Experts
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Mary Fitzgerald is a writer, researcher and consultant specialising in the Euro-Mediterranean region with a particular focus on Libya. Arriving in Benghazi days after anti-Gaddafi protests erupted there in February 2011, she spent several months on the ground in Libya reporting on the uprising that followed. She has worked on Libya since then and lived there in 2014.
She has conducted research on Libya for the International Crisis Group (ICG), the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), the European Institute of the Mediterranean (IEMED) and the European University Institute (EUI) among others. She has consulted for a number of international organisations working in Libya including in the areas of conflict mediation, civil society and youth empowerment.
She has worked on wider initiatives with UNESCO, the Anna Lindh Foundation, the British Council and other cultural organisations. She is a trustee of Friends of Europe.
Her work has appeared in publications including the Economist, Foreign Policy, the New Yorker, the Washington Post, the Financial Times, the Guardian, Monocle, and Roads & Kingdoms. She is a contributing author to an edited volume on the Libyan revolution and its aftermath published by Hurst/Oxford University Press.
Mary is a frequent contributor to international broadcast media such as the BBC (including BBC Radio 4’s From Our Own Correspondent), NPR and RFI. She has also worked on a number of award-winning radio documentaries for the BBC, one of which – on post-conflict Northern Ireland – won a Gold Sony Radio Academy Award.
She has given talks and participated in panel discussions on Libya at the University of Oxford, the London School of Economics, UCLA, Chatham House, Carnegie, Milan’s ISPI and several other institutions in Europe and the US.
As a journalist, Mary began her career reporting on post-conflict Northern Ireland, covering paramilitary feuds and the sectarianism that endured beyond the 1998 peace agreement. She spent seven years as a roving foreign correspondent for the Irish Times, reporting from more than 40 countries including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Sudan, Somalia, Mali, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Pakistan, Afghanistan, India and Burma. She has also reported on conflict and post-conflict dynamics in Darfur, Sierra Leone, South Sudan, Chad, Iraq, Bosnia, Palestine/Israel, Kosovo and Spain’s Basque region. She is a former Laurence Stern Fellow at the Washington Post.
