Katie Mishler
Dr. Katie Mishler specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Irish gothic writing, urban studies, and public humanities. Her current work employs the critical methodologies of geospatial analysis, text mapping, and cultural historicism to theorize a tradition of Irish urban gothic writing. At Notre Dame, she will pursue a book project exploring how literary depictions of urban centers contain the embedded, politically constructed stories of history. Within this context, Dr. Mishler’s work will focus on post- unionism, the relationship between London and Dublin, and warfare and incarceration in the gothic works of writers such as Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Oscar Wilde, Dorothy Macardle, and James Joyce.
Dr. Mishler has extensive experience in the field of the public humanities as an interdisciplinary curator, public speaker, podcaster, and interviewer. She previously held an Irish Research Council Enterprise Partnership Postdoctoral Fellowship (2020-2022) in collaboration with Museum of Literature Ireland (MoLI) and UCD Centre for Cultural Analytics. She is curator of the online multimedia exhibition "Dublin Gothic," which examines the relationship between place, space, and cultural memory in Ireland’s gothic tradition. As the host of the Dublin Gothic podcast on RadioMoLI, Dr. Mishler speaks to academic experts, heritage leaders, and creative practitioners about the enduring cultural legacy of nineteenth-century gothic, and to interrogate how Ireland’s supernatural writing informs contemporary politics and culture. She has also contributed programming to the Bram Stoker Festival in collaboration with Living Canvas. She is curator of the MoLI exhibition "Into the Island: Peig Sayers and the Blasket Island Tradition" (2022). This multimedia installation documents Sayers’ contribution to Irish literature as well as the rich history of oral storytelling and folk collecting on the Great Blasket Islands. Dr. Mishler has also served as researcher and assistant curator at MoLI, including multimedia exhibitions and events celebrating the centenary of Ulysses, most notably the installation "Love, Says Bloom."
Dr. Mishler completed her PhD in Anglo-Irish Writing at the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin in 2018. Her doctoral research was funded by the Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholarship Scheme under the supervision of Professor Margaret Kelleher. Her PhD research reconsiders the work of James Joyce within the context of Irish gothic writing, and has been published as a series of articles in New Hibernia Review and Joyce Studies Annual. Dr. Mishler also has an interest in contemporary women’s life writing, and has published research on storytelling as reproductive justice activism in a special issue of Éire-Ireland. She has received competitive funding to present her research at conferences such as the International James Joyce Symposium and the International Study for the Association of Irish Literatures, and has been invited to speak across Ireland and the UK.
As a lecturer at UCD, Dr. Mishler has designed and led courses on contemporary Irish writing, modernism, Victorian literature, gothic literature, and research methods. As a teacher and mentor, she integrates public and digital humanities, as well as Universal Learning Design theory, into her pedagogy. From 2018-2020 she served as the inaugural Editorial Fellow of the Irish University Review, and published a report outlining the journal’s fifty year history of equality, diversity, and inclusion. At the Centre for Cultural Analytics Dr. Mishler contributed to VICTEUR: European Migrants in the British Imagination: Victorian and Neo-Victorian Culture, a 5-year project funded by an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council, which uses text mining and big data to reframe social questions about the cultural identity of migrant and host communities in Britain.