Recorded December 5th, 2024.

Rooney Writer Fellow Mark O’Connell (A Thread of Violence, 2023) in conversation with historian Maurice Casey (Hotel Lux, 2024) about writing across the academic/commercial publishing boundary.

Mark O’Connell is the author of A Thread of Violence, Notes from an Apocalypse, and To Be a Machine, which was awarded the 2018 Wellcome Book Prize, the 2019 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, and was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction. He is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Slate, and The Guardian. He lives in Dublin with his family.

Dr Maurice J. Casey is a Research Fellow in Queen’s University Belfast, where he is a postdoc on a project exploring histories of queer sexuality in Northern Ireland. An expert on the history of international communism, he studied English and History at TCD before completing his MPhil at Cambridge and his DPhil in Oxford. He also held a Fulbright scholarship at Stanford and was the Historian in Residence at the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs and EPIC, the Irish Emigration Museum. His first book Hotel Lux: An Intimate History of Communism’s Forgotten Radicals, which was based on his PhD thesis, was published by Footnote Press in August 2024.

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