Prof. Dr. Maureen O'Connor
 | Travelling Visiting Professor in Irish Studies |
Prof. Dr. Maureen O’Connor is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English in University College Cork and the Travelling Visiting Professor in Irish Studies 2023/24 at the University of Würzburg.
She has published widely in the field of Irish Studies and has delivered keynote lectures in India, Japan, Austria, Spain, and France. She is the author of The Female and the Species: The Animal in Irish Women’s Writing (2010), considered by Nathaniel Myers to be ‘arguably the first substantial engagement with the intersections of Irish Studies and Animal Studies’. She has co-edited a number of field-defining volumes, including, with Derek Gladwin, a special issue of the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, ‘Irish Studies and the Environmental Humanities’ (2018); with Kathryn Laing and Sinéad Mooney, of Edna O’Brien: New Critical Perspectives (2006); with Lisa Colletta, of Wild Colonial Girl: Essays on Edna O’Brien (2006); and, with Tadhg Foley, of Ireland and India: Colonies, Culture, and Empire (2006).
Claire Bracken has said of Dr. O’Connor’s work that its ‘ecocritical analysis opens up space for new ways of thinking about embodied feminine subjectivity in contemporary cultural analysis’. Her latest book, Edna O’Brien and the Art of Fiction, published by Bucknell University Press in 2021, has been described by the novelist Éilís Ní Dhuibhne as ‘a wonderful book, indispensable for anyone with an interest in Edna O’Brien or contemporary Irish literature’. She is currently writing a volume for inclusion in the Cork University Press series, ‘Síreacht: Longings for Another Ireland’, on the topic of Animals.
