Aran Ward Sell

Aran Ward Sell

Dr. Aran Ward Sell specializes in contemporary modernist, experimental and “weird” fiction, and the aftermaths of economic and environmental crisis.

As W. B. Yeats Fellow in Irish Literature, Dr. Ward Sell examines emergent authors such as Danny Denton, Paul Lynch, Sarah Davis-Goff and Oisín Fagan, who imagine Irelands so wracked by destruction that the transactional structures of capitalism are rendered inoperable. This work treats environmental crisis caused by anthropogenic climate change as a mode of neoliberal capitalist collapse. It draws on theories of weirdness in contemporary speculative fiction, in both the “New Weird” movement in speculative fiction, and Mark Fisher’s separate but overlapping theorisation of “weird” and “eerie” modes of writing.

This project builds upon his 2020 University of Edinburgh Ph.D., which focused on Irish contemporary modernism in the wake of the 2008-9 financial crisis. This considered 2010s authors such as Eimear McBride, Mike McCormack, Anna Burns, Kevin Barry and Anakana Schofield, as writing a “stream of damaged consciousness”, which built upon and complicated of stream of consciousness modernism, particularly through the legacy of Joyce. He is developing this thesis into a monograph.

Dr. Ward Sell’s academic work has appeared in Irish Studies Review, C21 Literature, Alluvium, HJEAS, Antae and elsewhere. He has given conference papers at the University of Malta, University of Leeds (England) and KU Leuven (Belgium). In 2024, he will present at the American Conference for Irish Studies at Mary Immaculate College (Limerick, Ireland), the Canadian Association of Irish Studies conference at the University of Galway (Ireland), and at a Notre Dame symposium on “British Literature and the Art of Failure” in London.

He has taught English Literature and Scottish Literature at The University of Edinburgh, from where he also holds an MSc in Literature and Modernity and an MA in English Language and Literature. Outside of Scotland, he has lived and worked in London and Brisbane prior to coming to Notre Dame. He has worked extensively as a Learning Technologist, in digital resources and for public libraries. He is also a keen traveler, guitar player and writer of reviews and fiction.