Maureen O'Connor

Maureen O'Connor has been teaching in the English Department in UCC since 2011. A senior lecturer, she was the Travelling Visiting Professor in Irish Studies at the Julius-Maximilans Universität, Würzburg, Germany for the academic year 2023/2024. She received her BA in English and Creative Writing in Northwestern University, in Evanston, Illinois, and her MA and PhD degrees in English from Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California. She has taught in a number of undergraduate programmes in southern California, including Loyola Marymount University, Scripps College, and Pitzer College. She held an IRCHSS Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Moore Institute in the National University of Ireland, Galway, where she has also lectured in the English department, the Women's Studies MA programme, as well as in the MA programmes in Culture and Colonialism and in the Centre for Irish Studies. Before coming to UCC, she was a lecturer in Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick. She has published widely in Irish Studies, especially women's writing. Her research focuses on ecocritical and ecofeminist approaches to texts, with an emphasis on environmental concerns, the subject of much of her most recent transdisciplinary, collaborative outputs, for which she has received funding from the Irish Research Council and the Arts Council of Ireland. She is the author of The Female and the Species: The Animal in Irish Women's Writing (2010) and of Edna O'Brien and the Art of Fiction (2021); editor of Back to the Future of Irish Studies: Festschrift for Tadhg Foley (2010), and co-editor, 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). She has monographs forthcoming from Cork University Press and Bloomsbury.

My research interests are in Irish women writers of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, translatlantic Irishness of the fin-de-siecle period, the dandy, and Ireland and ecocriticism/ecofeminism.