Exploring twentieth- and twenty-first century texts that wrestle with the Irish domestic interior as a sexualized and commodified space, Body Politics in Contemporary Irish Women’s Fiction: The Literary Legacy of 'Mother Ireland' (Bloomsbury, 2025) provides readings of the power and authority of the feminized body in Ireland.

Scheible dissects the ways that 'the woman-as-symbol' remains consistent in Irish literary representations of national experience in Irish fiction and shows how this problematizes the role of women in Ireland by underscoring the oppression of sexuality and gender that characterized Irish culture during the twentieth century.

Examining works by Elizabeth Bowen, Pamela Hinkson, Emma Donoghue, Tana French, Sally Rooney and James Joyce, this book demonstrates that the definition of Irish nationhood in our contemporary experience of capitalism and biopolitics is dependent on the intertwining and paradoxical tropes of a traditional, yet equally sexual, feminine identity which has been quelled by violence and reproduction.

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Trauma, Memory and Silence of the Irish Woman in Contemporary Literature (Routledge, 2023) studies the manifestations of female trauma through the exploration of multiple wounds, inflicted on both body and mind and the soul of Irish women from Northern Ireland and the Republic within a contemporary context, and in literary works written at the turn of the twenty-first century and beyond. These artistic manifestations connect tradition and modernity, debunk myths, break the silence with the exposure of uncomfortable realities, dismantle stereotypes and reflect reality with precision. Women’s issues and female experiences depicted in contemporary fiction may provide an explanation for past and present gender dynamics, revealing a pathway for further renegotiation of gender roles and the achievement of equilibrium and equality between sexes. These works might help to seal and heal wounds both old and new and offer solutions to the quandaries of tomorrow.

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Sinéad O'Connor, renowned for her angelic voice and activism, overcame a tumultuous upbringing to become a global protest singer and advocate for social justice.

O'Connor achieved worldwide success as an angel-voiced, shaven-headed Irish singer of heartfelt songs, but she was far more than just a pop star - she was also an activist and a survivor. Reeling from a troubled childhood at the hands of her violent mother, she spent 18 months living in a former Magdalene Laundry due to her truancy and shoplifting, and suffered her mother's death in a car crash - all by the age of 18.

Her pain, anger and compassion would turn her into one of the world's greatest protest singers and activists. She would release ten studio albums during her 36-year music career - the second of which (I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got) would reach number 1 across the world and earn her ten million pounds, half of which she gave to charity. During this time, she would also advocate for survivors of child abuse and racism, and stand up for the LGBT community and women's reproductive rights.

Most notably, she would tear up a picture of Pope John Paul II during an episode of Saturday Night Live in order to protest at child sex abuse within the Catholic church, creating headlines around the world and derailing her career.

The Real Sinéad O'Connor (White Owl, 2024) features six exclusive interviews with friends and peers who knew her, this is the true story of her extraordinary and courageous journey.

Ariane Sherine’s website.

Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM and is the director of its music film festival. His forthcoming books are Frank Zappa's America (Louisiana State University Press, June 2025) and U2: Until the End of the World (Gemini Books, Fall 2025).

Bradley on Bluesky.

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George M. Cohan was one of those rare Broadway figures who was a composer, lyricist, playwright, performer, director, theater owner, and star actor. He could, quite literally, do it all. In his day, he was famous as the "Yankee Doodle Boy" from his hit song and as the "Man Who Owned Broadway" from his musical of the same name. Cohan's songs and shows captured the spirit of an era when staggering social change gave new urgency to efforts to define Americanism. 

Elizabeth Craft’s Yankee Doodle Dandy: George M. Cohan and the Broadway Stage (Oxford University Press, 2024) is not a conventional biography. Each chapter explores a different aspect of his life and career including Cohan’s approach to American nationalism, Irish American identity, celebrity, and the entertainment business along with defining what made Cohan’s shows unique. Craft finds songs and shows that serve as exemplars for each theme she highlights. The book ends with an examination of the 1942 biopic on Cohan and his enduring legacy. Yankee Doodle Dandy offers not only a fuller understanding of Cohan’s shows and career, but also new perspectives on fundamental debates about American identity and the performing arts in the early twentieth-century United States.

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The classical Bildungsroman charted an idealized path of human development—the harmonization of individual desires with societal norms in the formation of a well-rounded, liberal subject. But what happens when this Enlightenment blueprint for self-cultivation runs up against the particularities of a colonial society riven by nationalism, revolution, and uneven modernization?

The Irish Bildungsroman (Syracuse UP, 2025) provides the first comprehensive study of how this quintessentially bourgeois and European genre was transformed and reinvented by Irish writers from the Act of Union to the present day. Through incisive readings of over two centuries of Irish novels, the volume’s contributors illuminate the diverse narrative strategies Irish authors have employed to depict personal formation within a colonial/postcolonial nation fractured by religion, class, gender, and ethnic divisions.

Carefully periodized into three major sections, the book maps the evolution of the Irish Bildungsroman across key historical junctures: the rise of cultural nationalism in the nineteenth century, the revolutionary period and emergence of the postcolonial state in the early twentieth century, and more recent waves of globalization and the reconfiguration of Irish identity. From Maria Edgeworth’s post-Union novels to Sally Rooney’s millennial fictions, The Irish Bildungsroman excavates a rich vein of self-reflexive writing that creatively reworked this genre to expose the fault lines of liberal humanism and imagine new modes of selfhood.

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What were two Irish sisters doing in Russia during the early years of the nineteenth century, editing the French-language memoirs of a princess who had been a close confidante of Catherine the Great? Author Alexis Wolf is in conversation with Duncan McCargo about a remarkable transnational story she has unearthed through meticulous archival research. 

Transnational Women Writers in the Wilmot Coterie, 1798-1840 (Boydell Press, 2024) highlights the centrality of non-canonical, middle-ranking women writers to the production of literature and culture in Britain, Ireland, Europe and Russia in the late eighteenth century. The Irish writers and editors Katherine (1773-1824) and Martha Wilmot (1775-1873) left a unique record of middle-ranking women's literary practices and experiences of travel in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Their manuscripts are notable for their vivid portrayal of the era's political conflicts, capturing a flight from Ireland during the Irish Rebellion (1798), time spent in Paris during the Peace of Amiens (1801-03), and extended residences in Russia during the Napoleonic Wars. However, in their accounts of these key European events, the Wilmots' manuscripts, and published work, showcase their participation in a startling range of self-educating activities, including travel writing, biography, antiquarianism, early ethnographic observation, language acquisition, translation practices and editorial work. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, this book explores the collaborative relationships formed by women participating in cosmopolitan networks beyond the typical locations of the Grand Tour. Across their travels, the sisters met, engaged with, and learned from numerous key women of the time, including Princess Ekaterina Dashkova, Margaret King, Lady Mount Cashell and Helen Maria Williams. In this first full-length study to focus on the literary and cultural exchanges surrounding the Wilmot sisters, Wolf showcases how manuscript circulation, coterie engagement and transnational travel provided avenues for women to engage with the intellectual discourses from which they were often excluded.

Alexis Wolf is an independent scholar of eighteenth and nineteenth century literature.

Duncan McCargo is President's Chair in Global Affairs and a Professor of English (by courtesy) at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. 

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Samuel Beckett and Recent Irish Fiction: A Comparative Study (Routledge, 2025) considers Samuel Beckett's fiction and drama as major aesthetic and thematic influences on the work of Irish authors Eimear McBride, Keith Ridgway, Emma Donoghue, and Kevin Barry in the post-crash period of 2009-2015. Through cross-comparisons between the aesthetics and form of Beckett's Trilogy, Mercier and Camier, Footfalls and Not I, and those of a range of post-crash Irish novels including Beatlebone, Hawthorn and Child, Room, and A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing, this book establishes Beckett's continuing influence on Irish fiction. With particular reference to these newer authors' treatment of scarcity, trauma, indeterminism, gender and sexuality, and confinement in the context of major societal changes and traumas in Irish society since 2009, topics include the imposition of austerity, collapse of faith in institutions, and the increasing recognition of LGBTQIA+ and reproductive rights.

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Stephen Watt is the Provost Professor of English at Indiana University. His research interests include drama and theatre of the 19th and 20th centuries, Irish Studies, and the contemporary university and his recent works include Bernard Shaw’s Fiction, Material Psychology, and Affect: Shaw, Freud, Simmel (2018), “Something Dreadful and Grand”: American Literature and the Irish-Jewish Unconscious (2015), and Beckett and Contemporary Irish Writing (2009).

In this interview he discusses his new book, From the 'Troubles' to Trumpism: Ireland and America, 1960-2023 (Anthem Press, 2024), a personal history of Irish, American and Irish-American politics and culture since the 1960s.

The essays in this book combine historical investigation with cultural criticism to illuminate the present moment, particularly the present American moment. In this regard, the dates 1960 and 2023 in the book’s subtitle are by no means accidental. The first three chapters concern the history of America’s relationship with Ireland during the administrations of the presidents whose terms spanned the immediate pre-history and history of the Troubles. After a glance backward at American and Irish relations in the nineteenth century, the first chapter focuses on the 1960 election of John F. Kennedy, the first Catholic president in America’s history and the first to visit Ireland during his term of office. It also juxtaposes Kennedy’s jubilant 1963 trip to Ireland with Ronald Reagan’s more complicated homecoming in 1984. From there, the book traces Irish-American connections via the presidencies of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, Joe Biden and Donald Trump, as well as Michael D. Higgins.

Aidan Beatty is a lecturer in the history department at Carnegie Mellon University

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Ciaran O’Neill is the Ussher Associate Professor in Nineteenth-Century History at Trinity College Dublin. His work mainly focuses on the social and cultural history of Ireland and empire, the history of education and elites, colonial legacies, modern literature, and public history. In this interview, he discusses Power and Powerlessness in Union Ireland: Life in a Palliative State (Oxford UP, 2024), a survey of the state in nineteenth-century Ireland.

Life in a Palliative State is an exploratory book that challenges assumptions about who might have been powerful, or powerless, in Union Ireland. It decenters sectarian division, popular and parliamentary politics, and the tradition of physical-force nationalism and emphasizes transnational phenomena, a settler colonial diaspora, and minority groups on the island. Departing from the conventional focus on political leaders like Parnell and De Valera, the book concentrates on the everyday dynamics of power and resistance during the Union. Structured as interlocking essays spanning the long nineteenth century, the book begins by defining the power structures that governed Ireland. Subsequent chapters examine the governance of Ireland, the development of infrastructure, and the mapping of its population and territory. Drawing on feminist theories of power, the book also explores marginalized groups and their agency within Irish society, debunking the myth of Irish ‘ungovernability.’ One is the Irish diaspora, positioned as both a resource and a threat within the wider context of European settler colonialism. By analyzing the diaspora’s influence and the phenomenon of remittances, the book challenges prevailing notions of powerlessness. By tracing a geographical journey from East to West, the book questions traditional representations of authenticity and colonization

Power and Powerlessness in Union Ireland: Life in a Palliative State is published with Oxford University Press.

Aidan Beatty is a lecturer in history at Carnegie Mellon University

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In the eighteenth century, tens of thousands of travelers journeyed to Italy on the Grand Tour. These travels in the age of Enlightenment contributed to a massive reimagining of politics and the arts, of the market for culture, and of ideas about education and leisure.

A World Made by Traval: A Digital Grand Tour (Stanford UP, 2024) combines —in dynamic format— original research with data and visualizations about the lives and journeys of 6,007 travelers. It reveals the diverse experiences, elite and otherwise, that collectively constituted the eighteenth-century Grand Tour.

This digital publication transforms the foundational Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy, 1701–1800 (published by the Paul Mellon Centre [PMC] and compiled from the Brinsley Ford Archive held at the PMC) into an interactive and data-rich interface. It introduces more than a thousand new figures, including hundreds of women, servants, workers, and Italians not previously represented among the Dictionary's primary headings. This digital Grand Tour is more inclusive, and it addresses and invites vital questions about a historical phenomenon that has long been studied with a focus on the most elite and well-known travelers.

A World Made by Travel is framed by introductory chapters explaining its digital approach, contains exemplary essays by leading scholars who worked with its data, and offers resources to help teachers bring this wealth of material into the classroom. By opening up pressing questions of scale and representation through its Explorer, it models how digital approaches involving shareable data can facilitate original research and generate new knowledge about the past.

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