Professor McMahon has been a part-time film lecturer at AUP since 2015. She completed a Bachelor’s Degree in Arts (English-Music) and a Master’s Degree in Film Studies at University College Cork (Ireland). After a year out of academia in Paris, she commenced her PhD in 2007 as a member of Gonville & Caius College at the University of Cambridge. Combining her two passions, cinema and music, her doctoral research focused on the music and composers of the French New Wave. Since receiving her doctorate in 2012, she has taught at Paris-Sorbonne University (Paris IV), AUP, and the École normale supérieure (ENS).
McMahon's areas of research include French New Wave cinema, postwar European cinema, film music, and the more general fields of film history, theory, and criticism. Her first book Listening to the French New Wave: The Film Music and Composers of Postwar French Art Cinema was published by Peter Lang Oxford in 2014. Her most recent publication was a co-authored chapter on how music is used to explore the themes of memory, trauma, and the past in the films of Alain Resnais for the book Music in European Cinema. Current research interests focus on the topics of cinema as therapy and the relationship between psychology and film.