Burns Visiting Scholar
Claire Connolly is Professor of Modern English at University College Cork in Ireland. Her book A Cultural History of the Irish Novel, 1790-1829 (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism) won the Donald J. Murphy Prize for Distinguished First Monograph, awarded by the American Conference for Irish Studies. She has edited Theorizing Ireland (Palgrave, 2002) and, with Joe Cleary, the Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2005). Scholarly editions include two volumes in The Works of Maria Edgeworth (Pickering and Chatto, 1999-2003) and Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl (Pickering and Chatto, 2000) and she is the author of many essays and book chapters on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Irish culture. Interdisciplinary research projects that she has led include Deep Maps: West Cork Coastal Cultures and Ports, Past and Present and her interests span the blue, environmental and plant humanities.
With Marjorie Howes (Boston College), she was General Editor of the six volume series, Irish Literature in Transition, 1700-2020, as well as editor for Volume 2 of the series, Irish Literature in Transition, 1780-1830 (Cambridge UP). Her current project is a book on Irish Romanticism for Cambridge.
Prof Connolly is a member of the Royal Irish Academy, a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales and a Corresponding Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. She has been O’Brien Professor at Concordia University in Montreal and Parnell Fellow in Irish Studies at Magdalene College, Cambridge. She serves on the board of the Irish Research Council and the Council of the Royal Irish Academy and is a member of the editorial board for Cambridge Studies in Romanticism.