Elizabeth FitzPatrick holds a personal chair (2013) in Archaeology at NUI Galway. She was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Harvard in 2012. She is archaeology editor of Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy and a fellow of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland. Her research and teaching concerns the settlement archaeology and landscape history of Gaelic peoples of north Atlantic Europe 800-1600AD, and she leads collaborative publication projects that are important to exploring the cultural identity of Ireland. 

Her research includes investigation of Gaelic assembly places and practices, Gaelic service family settlements in the lordships of Ireland, and more recently a major enquiry into Finn mac Cumaill’s places among the Gaelic-speaking peoples of Ireland, Isle of Man and Scotland which links human settlement with landscapes of enriched natural resources. She conducted three seasons of archaeological excavation, sponsored by the Royal Irish Academy, in the settlement of the O’Davoren brehon lawyers at Cahermacnaghten in the Burren uplands of Co. Clare, between 2007 and 2010, the results of which will be published in a forthcoming monograph on Gaelic learned families in Ireland AD1200-1600: a cultural landscape study.

Her recent publications include 2015 Ollamh, biatach, comharba: lifeways of Gaelic learned families in medieval and early modern Ireland. Proceedings of the XIVth International Celtic Congress, Maynooth; 2013 ‘Formaoil na Fiann: hunting preserves and assembly places in Gaelic Ireland’, Proceedings of Harvard Celtic Colloquium 32; 2011 ‘Aughris headland’ for the 2nd edition of the Atlas of the Irish rural landscape; 2011 (with James Kelly eds) Domestic life in Ireland. Royal Irish Academy, and 2009 Native enclosed settlement and the problem of the Irish ring-fort, Medieval Archaeology.  Her major book publications include Royal inauguration in Gaelic Ireland c. 1100–1600: a cultural landscape study (2004); The parish in medieval and early modern Ireland: community territory and building (with R. Gillespie 2006); Archaeological investigations in Galway city 1987-1998 (with M. O’Brien and P. Walsh 2004) and Gaelic Ireland c.1250 – c.1650: land, lordship and settlement (with P. J. Duffy and D. Edwards 2001) which ran to a 2nd paperback edition (2004).