Dr. Katherine O’Callaghan lectures on Irish literature, James Joyce, modernism, and the role of music in novels at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She grew up in Dublin and moved to the US in 2015. She is an elected member of the Board of Trustees of the International James Joyce Foundation. In 2021 she was co-Academic Director of the International James Joyce Symposium, and in 2022 she was one of the keynote speakers for the Symposium’s celebration of the centenary of the publication of Ulysses.
She is the editor of Essays on Music and Language in Modernist Literature: Musical Modernism (Routledge, 2018, paperback edition 2020), and co-editor, with Oona Frawley, of Memory Ireland Volume IV: James Joyce and Cultural Memory (Syracuse UP, 2014). Her research and teaching reflect her interest in the roles of interdisciplinary, environmental, and migrant studies in the wider field of Irish studies. Recent publications include the “Sirens” essay in The Cambridge Centenary Ulysses (Cambridge UP, 2022), “Solastalgic Modernism and the West in Irish Literature (1900-1950)” in A History of Irish Literature and the Environment (Cambridge UP, 2022), and “The Riddle of the Brocken Spectre: Reading Finnegans Wake on the top of Croagh Patrick” in James Joyce Quarterly (2019).