The author of the recent book Israelites in Erin: Exodus, Revolution, and the Irish Revival, Abby Bender talks about future projects, publications, and teaching.

Area of Research
Nineteenth- and twentieth-century Irish writing and culture, specifically James Joyce, the Irish Revival, modernism, and Irish women’s writing.

What are you currently working on?
My current book project examines the figure of the nursing mother in Irish writing and culture. At the moment I am writing a chapter on Patrick Pearse, revolution, and sacrificial milk. Pearse is someone we tend to associate with the fetish of the male body, yet in all genres of his writing he returns again and again to images of literal and metaphorical breastfeeding.

I am also revising selections from my first book, Israelites in Erin: Exodus, Revolution, and the Irish Revival, for two edited collections—one that specifically addresses Irish-Jewish connections, and one that focuses on the biblical story of Exodus itself.

What are you currently reading?
For my current research, I’m reading Margaret Kelleher’s The Feminization of Famine, which locates as one of the archetypes of famine writing and reporting the child suckling from an empty breast. I’m also reading some Beckett, whose connections to this trope are elliptical and fascinating. I’ve just ordered Lucy McDiarmid’s new book, At Home in the Revolution: What Women Said and Did in 1916, which I’ve been looking forward to reading since I first heard about it.

On my bedside table is Maira Kalman’s gorgeous And the Pursuit of Happiness, in which I was delighted to find an allusion to Ulysses. . . . I am rereading it for my Joyce seminar this semester. Although we are long past Dubliners in that class, I am still picking up Vicki Mahaffey’s edited collection Collaborative Dubliners: Joyce in Dialogue, which contains brilliant cowritten essays by many of my favorite Joyceans. With my mythology-obsessed 8-year-old, I’m reading Robert Fagles’ wonderful translation of The Odyssey.

Bibliography of recent work

Israelites in Erin: Exodus, Revolution, and the Irish Revival. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2015.

“The Bloomsday Seder: Joyce and Jewish Memory.” In Memory Ireland Volume 4: Joyce and Cultural Memory, ed. Oona Frawley and Katherine O’Callaghan. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2014.