The coeditor of the upcoming Unfolding Irish Landscapes: Tim Robinson, Culture and Environment (2016) talks about recent reads, creative work, and the educational advocacy organization Narrative 4.
Area of Research
I focus primarily on studies of contemporary Irish literature and environmental criticism, the latter of which allows me the indulgence of invoking truly interdisciplinary approaches to a range of cultural texts.
What are you currently working on?
Having just completed a project on Tim Robinson, I’m in the wonderfully daunting place of forging new paths in my scholarship. I am giving more time to creative work, mostly nonfiction. And I am in the early stages of a new book that explores the Irish artist’s role in redefining the boundaries between creative and civic discourse and action. This too will be interdisciplinary study, and I am looking at novelists, poets, filmmakers, and nonfiction writers. I’m interested in how the creative act prepares the artist for a specific and necessary form of engagement with larger questions of social justice and environmental consciousness.
I am also really excited about my work to bring Narrative 4 to my campus and to local schools. Two years ago, I discovered Narrative 4 because of my work in Irish Studies. Colum McCann is the president and a powerful voice for the organization’s mission of “fearless hope through radical empathy.” The pulse of this organization immediately touched my passion for the way stories evoke and speak to our shared humanity—this was the reason that I wanted to read, to teach, to write—long before I ever thought about what it meant to be a “scholar.” And so I guess that I am at this incredible sort of place where so much that I care about in this work is coalescing. I feel very grateful.
What are you currently reading?
This time of year I am reading many, many drafts of first-year writing compositions! I am always surprised by how much I learn from these essays. But this month, I am also making time to read Moya Cannon’s Keats Lives, Colum McCann’s Thirteen Ways of Looking, and Robert Macfarlane’s Landmarks. Such different, but equally fascinating and moving texts.
Bibliography of recent work
Unfolding Irish Landscapes: Tim Robinson, Culture and Environment. Ed. with Derek Gladwin. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2016.
“‘And Now Intellect, Discovering Its Own Effects’: Tim Robinson as Narrative Scholar.” In Unfolding Irish Landscapes: Tim Robinson, Culture and Environment, ed. Christine Cusick and Derek Gladwin. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2016.
“A Call to Tea,” New Hibernia Review 19:4 (Winter 2015).
“‘Clacking along the Concrete Pavement’: Economic Isolation and the Bricolage of Place in James Joyce’s Dubliners.” In Eco-Joyce: Space, Place, and Environment in the Writings of James Joyce, ed. Robert Brazeau and Derek Gladwin. Cork: Cork University Press, 2014.