Academic Profile

Specializes in Irish literature and culture, especially contemporary narrative, and cultural studies. His graduate seminars include "Contemporary Irish Fiction," "Twentieth Century Irish Fiction," and "Ireland: The Colonial Context." His undergraduate electives include "American Literary History II," "Contemporary Fiction: Britain and Ireland," "Major Irish Writers," and both 19th and 20th century surveys of Irish literature. His recent book, Ireland's Magdalen Laundries and the Nation's Architecture of Containment, focusing on representations of institutional care in post-independence Ireland, won the Donald Murphy Prize for Distinguished First Book awarded by the American Conference for Irish Studies in 2007.  He is currently engaged in a project examining the place of the child in Irish society and how the meaning of childhood in Ireland has changed over time.  He continues to be interested in recent scandals in the Irish Catholic Church and the manner in which these affect relations between Church, state and society.

Spring 2013 Courses

• EN082 - Literature and Society
  
• EN518 - Reading Irish Childhood

Publications

Book

• Ireland's Magdalen Laundries and the Nation's Architecture of Containment (Southbend, IN:  The University of Notre Dame Press, 2007). 312 pp. European Edition published by Manchester University Press, 2008.

Editor

• Co-Editor with Maria Luddy. Éire-Ireland: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Irish Studies. Special Double Issue, "Children, Childhood and Irish Society." 44: 1 & 2 (2009): 296 pp.
• Two Irish National Tales: Maria Edgeworth’sCastle Rackrent and Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl. Editor. New Riverside Editions. British Series Editor, Alan Richardson.  Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005. 447 pp.

Journal Articles

• "Editors' Introduction," with Maria Luddy. Éire-Ireland: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Irish Studies. Special Double Issue, "Children, Childhood and Irish Society." 44: 1 & 2 (2009): 5-8.
• “The Magdalene Sisters: Evidence, Testimony … Action?” Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society 32, 2 (Winter, 2007): 431-58.
• “The Politics of Sexual Knowledge: The Origins of Ireland’s Containment Culture and ‘The Carrigan Report’ (1931).” Journal of the History of Sexuality. 13, 2 (2004): 208-233.
• “Remembering Ireland’s Architecture of Containment: ‘Telling’ Stories in The Butcher Boy and States of Fear.” Éire-Ireland: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Irish Studies 36, 3&4 (2001): 111-130.
• “Effaced History: Facing the Colonial Contexts of Ben Jonson’s Irish Masque at Court.” ELH 65 (1998): 297-321.

Essays

• “Re-Imagining Ireland, Britain and Europe.” Traversing the Imaginary. Eds. Peter Gratton and John P. Manoussakis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007.
• “Sexual Abuse and the Irish Church: Crisis and Responses” (with Robert Savage). Occasional Papers, 2003. The Church in the 21st Century. Boston College Online Publication.
• “Retelling Stories: Exposing Mother Ireland in Kathy Prendergast’s Body Map Series and Mary Leland’s The Killeen.” Re/Dressing Cathleen: Contemporary Works From Irish Women Artists. Ed. Jennifer Grinnell and Alston Conley. Boston: McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, 1997. 42-51.

Miscellaneous

• “Irish Society Colluded in Betrayal of Magdalen Women.” Opinion-Editorial. The Irish Times 1 Sept. 2003: 12.
• “The Magdalene Sisters in America.” Commentary. The Alliance for the Study of Adoption, Identity & Kinship Newsletter 5 (Fall, 2003): 1 & 3-4.
• “Re-Imagining Ireland, Britain and Europe.”  Rev. of Postnationalist Ireland: Politics, Culture, Philosophy by Richard Kearney.  The Irish Literary Supplement 16, 2 (1997): 23-4.

Additional Professional Information

For further information regarding Irish Studies at Boston College, including information regarding graduate programs, faculty listings, and calendar of events, view: http://www.bc.edu/centers/irish/studies/.