With a talk titled "Swift, Gulliver, and the Art of Travel," Daniel Carey, Director of the Moore Institute for Research in the Humanities and Social Studies at the National University of Ireland, Galway, will open the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies' signature Speakers and Public Talks Series for the Fall 2018 semester.
Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) stands in a long tradition of travel satire that emerged in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Despite the centrality of travel to the story, little has been done by critics to identify this tradition and Swift’s indebtedness to it. His forebears include Thomas More, Rabelais, Ben Jonson, Richard Brome, George Etherege, and a host of critics writing on the art of travel. Swift’s genius lies in taking this critique to new extremes.
Professor Carey was educated at McGill University, Trinity College Dublin, and the University of Oxford, where he took his D.Phil. He is a board member of the Irish Research Council and has served as chair of the Irish Humanities Alliance (2014-16). He has held grants from the Mellon Foundation, the Irish Research Council, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the British Academy, the Modern Humanities Research Association, and other sources, and has mentored 12 postdoctoral fellows funded by Marie Skłodowska Curie actions, the Irish Research Council, and other schemes. His current research is a major international project to edit the work of Richard Hakluyt (http://www.hakluyt.org/). He has published widely on intellectual history, colonialism, and economic thought.