Colleen Taylor, Yeats Fellow in Irish Literature

Dr. Colleen Taylor specializes in Irish and British literature of the long eighteenth century, the environmental humanities, and new materialisms.

As the inaugural Yeats Fellow in Irish Literature, she will embark on a new project that examines Irish culture through the lens of the blue humanities. Specifically, she will explore how Irish writing invokes the subversive potentials of oceanic nonhuman encounter, focusing on topics like shipwrecks, sea mythos, seaweed collecting, and sea life. Her project seeks to formulate the Irish blue imaginary as a counter-narrative to British naval mastery and to theorize the gendered and decolonial implications of engaging the ocean in Irish writing.

While she was an NEH Fellow at the Keough-Naughton Institute in the 2021-2022 academic year, Dr. Taylor completed her first monograph, titled Irish Materialisms: The Nonhuman and the Making of Colonial Ireland, 1690-1830, which is forthcoming. She has published articles in Eire-Ireland, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, Persuasions, as well as a chapter in Ireland, Enlightenment, and the English Stage (Cambridge UP). Her latest publication, “Edgeworth’s ‘Great Coat’: A Material-Semiotic Reading of the Irish Mantle and Novelistic Subjectivity” is forthcoming in Eighteenth-Century Fiction (Spring 2023).

Dr. Taylor earned her Ph.D. from Boston College in 2020, where she was the recipient of the Dalsimer Irish Studies Fellowship, the Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences Dissertation Fellowship, and the Irish Studies Exchange Fellowship at Queen’s University Belfast. Before coming to Notre Dame, she was an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow with the School of English at University College Cork.

Dr. Taylor teaches classes on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature, feminist theory, Irish Studies, and satire. In 2018, she won the American Conference for Eighteenth-Century Studies' Innovative Course Design competition for her course on Irish women’s writing before 1900. She looks forward to teaching courses on the environmental humanities and Irish literature at Notre Dame.