Anne Labouisse Dean grew up in New Orleans, the city she still calls home. After ten years away in the east, earning her BA in Political Science at Wellesley College, and PhD in psychology from Catholic U. in Washington, DC, she returned to New Orleans to raise a family and teach developmental psychology at the University of New Orleans. In the meantime, she trained to become a clinical psychoanalyst at the New Orleans Psychoanalytic Institute, and practiced both in New Orleans and Eugene, OR, where she and her husband now live with no pets. In the late nineties, as a visiting scholar at Queen's University, Belfast, Anne and her husband conducted an ethnographic study of the Northern Ireland Troubles. Irish history, Brian Boru, and the continuing but failed efforts of subsequent Irish heroes over the last millennium to unite the whole island under Irish governance, has intrigued her ever since.