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Colleen Taylor (Boston College): ‘Tales of seals and shipwrecks: Irish new materialism goes to sea’

What happens when Irish Studies goes out to sea and underwater? This paper uses the theoretical fields of new materialism and the blue humanities to think through Irish culture's watery imagination. Using seal folklore and an eighteenth-century shipwreck as case studies, it will examine the dialogue between ocean science and Irish narrative.

Colleen Taylor is Assistant Professor of English and Irish Studies at Boston College. Her research specializes in 18th-century Irish and British literature and the environmental humanities, and how Irish ecologies facilitated cultural expression and colonial resistance. She is the author of Irish Materialisms: The Nonhuman and the Making of Colonial Ireland, 1690-1830 (OUP, 2024), and her articles have appeared in Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Eire-Ireland, and Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature. Colleen previously held the NEH Fellowship at Notre Dame and an IRC Postdoctoral Award at UCC. Her current research project examines 18th- and 19th-century Irish culture through the blue humanities, theorizing the decolonial implications of Ireland's oceanic imagination. She is our Boston College-QUB Faculty Exchange fellow in Irish Studies for 2025.

This seminar is available both in-person and online via MS Teams.

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