"Race, Violence and Form: Reframing Nineteenth-Century Ireland" - Panel Discussion

Please join the Keough-Naughton Institute for a panel discussion with Renée Fox, Mary Mullen, and Amy Mulligan on the edited volume, Race, Violence, and Form: Reframing Nineteenth Century Ireland (Liverpool University Press, 2026). A light lunch will be served from 12:15 - 12:45pm, followed by the panel.

Abstract

Irish literary studies has long subordinated the nineteenth century to the experimental triumphs of Irish modernism, variously dismissing its achievements as too indebted to British forms to be truly Irish, too transparently rooted in Irish history and politics to be globally or universally relevant, and too aesthetically weak to be worth close formal analysis. Race, Violence, and Form: Reframing Nineteenth-Century Ireland challenges these critical orthodoxies, employing new methodological frameworks that expand how we understand the global, racial, formal, periodized, and political scope of nineteenth-century Irish literature.

 

Renée Fox is Associate Professor of Literature and the Jordan-Stern Presidential Chair in Dickens and Nineteenth-Century Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she co-directs the Dickens Project and the Center for Monster Studies. She is the author of The Necromantics: Reanimation, the Historical Imagination, and Victorian British and Irish Literature (Ohio State UP, 2023), co-editor (with Mary Mullen) of Race, Violence, and Form: Reframing Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Liverpool UP, 2026), and co-editor (with Mike Cronin and Brian O’Conchubhair) of the Routledge International Handbook of Irish Studies (Routledge, 2021). She is co-curating an exhibition at the New York Historical entitled Irish Literature: History and Myth Since 1798 that opens later this month, and her current book project is called Violent Reading: Irish Novels and the Politics of Nineteenth-Century Genre.

 

 

 

Mary L. Mullen is a Professor of English at Villanova University. She is the author of Novel Institutions: Anachronism, Irish Novels, and Nineteenth-Century Realism (Edinburgh, 2019) and a co-editor (with Renée Fox) of Race, Violence and Form: Reframing Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Liverpool, 2026). She has published articles on English and Irish writing, settler colonialism, publics, and the politics of time. Her book, The Colonial Politics of Public Interest, is forthcoming from Cornell University Press

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Amy C. Mulligan is Associate Professor of English and Faculty Fellow in Irish Studies, Medieval Studies and Gender Studies at University of Notre Dame. The goal of her work has been to put medieval Ireland, Iceland and Wales into larger North Atlantic contexts, past and present. Her books and articles have centered on written, material and oral discourses exploring national and transnational identity formation, gender and corporeality, landscape and place-writing, and have been supported by NEH and Fulbright fellowships. She co-edited a volume on oral-literary continuums in Moving Words: Literacies, Texts and Verbal Communities of the Nordic Middle Ages (2019), and her first monograph A landscape of words: Ireland, Britain, and the poetics of space, 700-1250 (2019) won the ACIS Donald Murphy prize. Amy’s current book project is entitled Medieval Chicago: the Allure of the Past in America’s Second City, 1871-1934.