Mary O'Connell

I am a Lecturer in English in the Department of English, University College Cork, teaching in the areas of 19th century literature and crime fiction. I completed an IRC funded doctoral thesis in 2009 and subsequently held the position of Leverhulme Fellow at the School of English, University of St. Andrews. Following that, I was NUI Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of English, UCC.

My first monograph, Byron and John Murray: A Poet and His Publisher (Liverpool University Press, 2015) was the first major study of Byron’s literary association and personal friendship with his publisher and represented a significant contribution to the field of Byron studies. I co-edited (with Graham Allen and Carrie Griffin) Readings on Audience and Textual Materiality (Pickering & Chatto, 2014) and with Griffin I have worked extensively on the archive of the Victorian printer Charles Clark. The Clark project won several awards, including the Bibliographical Society’s Antiquarian Booksellers Award. I have published in the areas of Romantic literature, book history, and particularly Regency Print Culture. My areas of research interest include 19th century book history, Romantic literature, detective fiction and representations of neurodivergence in fiction.

Romantic Literature, Victorian Literature, Publishing History, Book History, Crime Fiction, Representations of Neurodivergence in Literature.

Undergraduate teaching

EN1101 Literature in Context

EN2043 Romance and Realism

EN3073 Victorian Literature

EN3072 Romantic Literature

EN3003 Five Great Detectives 

BA Dissertation supervision 

Postgraduate

EN6027 Romanticism and Modernity

Dissertation Supervision

Individual

2015 National University of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship €80,000

2014 Royal Irish Academy, Mobility Award €2,000

2012 Leverhulme Visiting Research Fellow, School of English, University of St. Andrews

2004 Postgraduate Scholarship, Irish Research Council

Collaborative

2026 With Dr Liz Quirk SATLE Grant for 'Gulliver and the Language Machine' €1945.88

2013 Transitional Project Research Award, CACSSS UCC €1,000

2012 Irish Research Council New Foundations Award (With C. Griffin) for 'The Victorian Book Collector and Printer Charles Clark: A New Digital Archive'. €5750

2006-2008  Research Award for co-founding and co-direction of Making Books, Shaping Readers project, School of English, UCC. €12,000 per annum. 

2008  National Academy for Integration of Research, Teaching and Learning. €1,000.  

2008  Fáilte Ireland; for Making Books, Shaping Readers Conference.  €1,250.  

2008  College of Arts, Celtic Studies and Social Sciences, UCC, €5,000. 

2007  The President's Strategic Fund, UCC, for development of Graduate Training Course. €3,500. 

2007  University of Bielefeld, Fund for International Summer School, Awarded to Making Books, Shaping Readers. €5,000.  

2007  Fáilte Ireland; for Making Books, Shaping Readers Inaugural Conference . 

€2,400.  

2007  Association for Archives and Manuscripts in Research Collections. €300.  

2007  College of Arts, Celtic Studies and Social Sciences, UCC. €1,500 

2006  The Quality Improvement Fund, UCC, for Making Books, Shaping 

Readers. €2,750 . 

Dante Kunc "Narratives of Neurodivergence in Nineteeth-Century Literature" Lead Supervisor 

Jamie Keegan "Re-evaluating monstrous forms in human-sublime encounters in English Romantic poetry and prose" Lead Supervisor

Anastasia Pantazi "The Simulacrum of queerness: aesthetics, colonial power and the limits of transgression in mainstream Dark Academia media' Co-Supervisor