Julie Morrissy, Postdoctoral Research Associate
Dr. Julie Morrissy specialises in creative writing, the legal humanities, and archive.
As a Postdoctoral Research Associate for Fall 2022, she will begin a new project that examines international campaigns for Irish sovereignty by women activists following the Easter Rising and during the formation of the Irish Free State. Drawing together her expertise as Poet-in-Residence at the National Library of Ireland and NEH Fellow at the Keough-Naughton Institute, this new project engages poetry and playwriting to explore US lecture tours undertaken by prominent revolutionary women between 1916-1925. Building on research by historian Joanne Mooney Eichacker, Dr. Morrissy continues important recovery work for the feminist history of Ireland, particularly emphasising the impact of cross-cultural exchange in formulating the language of an Irish Republic.
As an NEH fellow, Dr. Morrissy embarked on playwriting for the first time in her practice. She completed an adaptation of her play “Certain Individual Women”: A Movement, which was workshopped by leading theatre-makers Nicola Murphy (Irish Repertory Theatre NYC) and Jim Culleton (Fishamble Theatre), and law and literature scholar Dr. Adam Hanna (University College Cork). In the summer of 2022 Morrissy was selected as a contributing participant at the prestigious Sewanee Writers’ Conference to work further on her play. Her National Library pamphlet Radical! Women and the Irish Revolution of poetry, images, maps, and photographs was published in 2022, following her successful podcast series of the same name. Her literary scholarship is forthcoming in Teaching Modern Irish Poetry in English (MLA 2023), The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Irish Writing (Routledge 2024), and Feminist Constitutional Futures (Birmingham UP 2024). In 2021-22 her poems, essays, reviews, and interviews have been published in The Irish Times, The Irish independent, The Stinging Fly, Poetry Ireland Review, Law and Literature: The Irish Case (Liverpool UP 2022), and Zócalo Public Square. She presented her work at Glucksman Ireland House at New York University, the Theodore Dreiser Visiting Writers Series at Indiana State University, Belfast Book Festival, and the Snite Museum of Art.
Dr.. Morrissy earned her PhD at Ulster University, where she was awarded the Vice-Chancellor's Research Scholarship. She also holds degrees in Literature (Toronto Metropolitan University 2014), and Law (University College Dublin 2006). She was the first Poet-in-Residence at the National Library of Ireland in the Decade of Centenaries programme. From 2019-21 she was the inaugural John Pollard Newman Fellow in Creativity at University College Dublin.
Her books, poetry, and video projects can be seen at her website: Julie Morrissy.