Professor Sinéad Moynihan
Professor
4330
01392 724330
Overview
I am an American Studies specialist with satellite interests in Transatlantic Literary Studies and, particularly, the Irish Atlantic. My third monograph, Ireland, Migration and Return Migration: The "Returned Yank" in the Cultural Imagination, 1952 to present was published by Liverpool UP in March 2019 and was awarded the Michael J. Durkan Prize for Books on Language and Culture by the American Conference for Irish Studies. My second book, the outcome of a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, is "Other People's Diasporas": Negotiating Race in Contemporary Irish and Irish-American Culture (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 2013). My first book, Passing into the Present: Contemporary American Fiction of Racial and Gender Passing, appeared wtih Manchester UP in 2010.
My current research project is titled For Export Only: Irish Writers and U.S. Magazines. Comprising case studies of individual magazines, the project aims to 1) dislodge “exile” and “emigration” as the dominant modes of framing Irish literary culture that is produced and/or circulated beyond the borders of the nation-state 2) significantly expand scholarship that challenges claims that mid-twentieth-century Irish literary culture was a cultural wasteland stymied by the Catholic church, censorship and a dearth of homegrown, sustainable publishing outlets.
From January 2019 to December 2022, I was co-editor-in-chief, with Nick Witham, of the Journal of American Studies (Cambridge UP).
My office is Queen's 314.
Research
My research interests cluster around American, Irish and Transatlantic Literature and Culture, particularly in relation to questions of migration, diaspora and race. My Ph.D., on narratives of racial and gender passing, was grounded in critical race theory and was committed to elucidating the ongoing importance of questioning whiteness as an identity category that passes as invisible and non-raced. A monograph based on my Ph.D., Passing into the Present: Contemporary American Fiction of Racial and Gender Passing, was published in 2010.
Although I was concerned with race in an American, particularly African American, context at that point in my early career (2003-2006), I could not ignore contemporaneous developments in my home country, Ireland, in which the attractions of the Celtic Tiger economy meant that demographics were rapidly changing and the country was incorporating relatively large numbers of non-white immigrants. Suddenly, certain tenacious historical myths regarding Irish solidarity with other oppressed groups (Irish Americans siding with Mexicans in the Mexican American War of 1848; the Irish welcome received by Frederick Douglass on his visit to Ireland in the 1840s; the disproportionate Irish donations to Ethiopian Famine Relief in the 1980s) would be tested to their limit. In my second book, therefore, I was interested in the relationship between Irishness and whiteness in a historical and contemporary context and, particularly, in how questions of whiteness were being negotiated in a suddenly multicultural Ireland.
In 2007, I was awarded an Early Career Fellowship by the Leverhulme Trust which enabled me to research and write this project: “Other People’s Diasporas”: Negotiating Race in Contemporary Irish and Irish-American Culture, which was published by Syracuse University Press in 2013. Using and extending my expertise in critical race studies, the premise of the book is that (re)imagining Irish diasporic experience in the United States in various ways – particularly as this relates to Irish interactions with African Americans – has, in the last decade, become absolutely central to representations of contemporary multicultural Ireland.
My most recently completed book project is a cultural history of the figure of the "Returned Yank" in the cultural imagination, 1952 to present. It was published in March 2019 by Liverpool UP and was awarded the Michael J. Durkan prize for Books on Language and Culture by the American Conference for Irish Studies.
Supervision
I would be happy to supervise Ph.D. dissertations in any of the following areas:
- Twentieth-and twenty-first century American literature
- African American and Ethnic American literature
- Contemporary American fiction, 1990s to present
- Contemporary Irish fiction, 1990s to present
- Race, Racial Passing, Whiteness Studies and the Black Atlantic
- Transnationalism and Diaspora
- Irish / American Transatlantic Culture
Research students
With Florian Stadtler, I jointly supervise:
- Hasnul Djohar, undertaking a Ph.D. on contemporary British and American Muslim Women's Writing
I act as second supervisor to:
- Candice Allmark-Kent, undertaking a Ph.D. on the representation of animals in twentieth-century Canadian Literature
- Ruth Gilligan, undertaking a Creative Writing Ph.D. I supervise the critical element, entitled: “Towards a Narratology of Otherness”
Publications
Copyright Notice: Any articles made available for download are for personal use only. Any other use requires prior permission of the author and the copyright holder.
| 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015 | 2014 | 2013 | 2012 | 2011 | 2010 | 2009 | 2008 | 2007 |
2023
- Moynihan S. (2023) Race, politics, and Irish America: a Gothic history, Irish Studies Review, volume 31, no. 3, pages 454-457, DOI:10.1080/09670882.2023.2234689.
2022
- Moynihan S. (2022) Joe Cleary, The Irish Expatriate Novel in Late Capitalist Globalization, Irish University Review, volume 52, no. 1, pages 162-165, DOI:10.3366/iur.2022.0552.
- Moynihan S. (2022) “Like a Homing Bird to its Nest”: Irish Writers and Mid-Century U.S. Magazines, Eire-Ireland; a journal of Irish studies, volume 57.3-4, pages 311-338.
- Moynihan S. (2022) “Suspect-Proof”? Paranoia, Suspicious Reading, and the Racial Passing Narrative, American Literary History, volume 34, no. 1, pages 272-282, DOI:10.1093/alh/ajab089.
2021
- Moynihan S. (2021) Introduction: New Perspectives on Brian Moore, Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, volume 44.2, pages 15-37.
- Moynihan S. (2021) “I come back to stand here, a revenant”: Brian Moore’s Transatlantic Travel Writing, Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, volume 44.2, pages 91-122.
- MOYNIHAN S. (2021) Ann Mattis, Dirty Work: Domestic Service in Progressive Women's Fiction (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019, $75.00). Pp. 248. isbn 978 0 4721 3129 7, Journal of American Studies, volume 55, no. 1, DOI:10.1017/s0021875820001607.
- Moynihan S. (2021) Romans à Clef of the Harlem Renaissance, A History of the Harlem Renaissance, Cambridge UP, 125-1943.
- Jameela M, Moynihan S, Witham NICK. (2021) Gender inequalities and academic journal publishing: The view from the journal of american studies, Journal of American Studies, pages 1-24, DOI:10.1017/S0021875820001668.
2020
- MOYNIHAN S. (2020) Molly Littlewood McKibbin, Shades of Gray: Writing the New American Multiracialism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018, $65.00). Pp. 348. isbn 978 0 8032 9681 7, Journal of American Studies, volume 54, no. 3, pages 639-641, DOI:10.1017/s002187582000050x.
- MOYNIHAN S. (2020) Mollie Godfrey and Vershawn Ashanti Young (eds.), Neo-passing: Performing Identity after Jim Crow (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018, $28.00). Pp. 296. isbn 978 0 2520 8323 5, Journal of American Studies, volume 54, no. 1, pages 255-257, DOI:10.1017/s0021875819001555.
- Moynihan S. (2020) Christin Marie Taylor, Labor Pains: New Deal Fictions of Race, Work, and Sex in the South, Literature & History, volume 29, no. 2, pages 229-232, DOI:10.1177/0306197320947863.
- Moynihan S. (2020) “‘A Sly Mid-Atlantic Appropriation’: Ireland, the United States and Transnational Fictions of Spain,”, Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Fiction, Oxford UP, 516-532.
- Moynihan S. (2020) “American Homespun Fascists”: Sean O’Casey and the Returning Veteran at the American Negro Theatre, Modern Drama: world drama from 1850 to the present, volume 63.4, pages 393-414. [PDF]
2019
- MOYNIHAN S. (2019) Geoffrey Sanborn, Plagiarama: William Wells Brown and the Aesthetic of Attractions (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016, $60.00/£44.00). Pp. 224.isbn 978 0 2311 7442 8.Daniel Hack, Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017, $35.00). Pp. 284.isbn 978 0 6911 6945 3, Journal of American Studies, volume 52, no. 4, pages 1143-1148, DOI:10.1017/s0021875818001044.
- MOYNIHAN S. (2019) N. Megan Kelley, Projections of Passing: Postwar Anxieties and Hollywood Films, 1947–1960 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2016, $65.00). Pp. 264. isbn 978 1 4968 0627 7, Journal of American Studies, volume 53, no. 3, pages 844-846, DOI:10.1017/s0021875819000562.
- Moynihan SB. (2019) "Ann Petry’s Cakewalk: Domestic Workers and The New Yorker at Mid-Century", MELUS, volume 44, pages 1-21, DOI:10.1093/melus/mly068. [PDF]
2018
- Moynihan S. (2018) Alison Shonkwiler, The Financial Imaginary: Economic Mystification and the Limits of Realist Fiction, Literature & History, volume 27, no. 1, pages 110-112, DOI:10.1177/0306197317746008e.
- Moynihan S. (2018) “The Lost Apostrophe”?: Race, the roots journey and the “Rose of Tralee” pageant, Irish Studies Review, volume 26, no. 1, pages 38-54, DOI:10.1080/09670882.2017.1412099.
2017
- MOYNIHAN S, WITHAM N. (2017) The “Second Project”, Journal of American Studies, volume 51, no. 2, article no. E17, DOI:10.1017/s0021875817000020. [PDF]
2016
- Moynihan SB. (2016) "'We are where we are': Colm Tóibín's Brooklyn, Mythologies of Return and the Post-Celtic Tiger Moment", The Edinburgh Companion to Atlantic Literary Studies, Edinburgh UP, 88-102.
2015
- Moynihan S. (2015) ‘That Was Us’: contemporary Irish theatre and performance, Studies in Theatre and Performance, volume 35, no. 3, pages 268-269, DOI:10.1080/14682761.2015.1015822.
- MOYNIHAN S. (2015) Kathleen M. Gough, Kinship and Performance in the Black and Green Atlantic (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2014, $125.00). Pp. xii + 208. isbn 978 0 4158 2400 2, Journal of American Studies, volume 49, no. 2, pages 427-428, DOI:10.1017/s0021875815000274.
- Moynihan SB. (2015) "'Pen and Ink and Page': The 'American Letter' in Irish Atlantic Literature", Symbiosis: a journal of anglo-american literary relations, volume 19, no. 2, pages 171-191.
- Moynihan SB. (2015) "'From Disposability to Recycling': William Faulkner and the New Politics of Re-writing in Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones", Studies in the Novel, volume 47, no. 4, pages 550-567.
- Moynihan SB. (2015) “‘Watch me go invisible": Representing Racial Passing in Mat Johnson and Warren Pleece’s Incognegro, South Central Review, volume 32, no. 3, pages 45-69.
2014
- Williamsen E, Richardson RC, Lupton JR, Hawkins Z, Barclay K, Ulph C, Pethers M, Ward S, Moynihan S, Kaul C. (2014) Reviews: Before Orientalism: Asian Peoples and Cultures in European Travel Writing, 1245–1510, the Arts of Remembrance in Early Modern England: Memorial Cultures of the Post Reformation, a Will to Believe: Shakespeare and Religion, Uncommon Tongues: Eloquence and Eccentricity in the English Renaissance, Be it Ever So Humble: Poverty, Fiction, and the Invention of the Middle-Class Home, Backstage in the Novel: Frances Burney and the Theatre Arts, Protocols of Liberty: Communication, Innovation and the American Revolution, Romanticism and the Rural Community, Alone in America: The Stories That Matter, India in Britain: South Asian Networks and Connections, 1858–1950, Beastly Journeys: Travel and Transformation at the Fin de Siècle, London Underground: A Cultural Geography, London's Underground Spaces: Representing the Victorian City, 1840–1915, Literature, Modernism, and Dance, When Sex Changed: Birth Control Politics and Literature between the World Wars, Scarecrows of Chivalry: English Masculinities after Empire, British Fiction and the Cold War, Reading History in Children's Books, the End of Normal: Identity in a Biocultural Era, Literature & History, volume 23, no. 2, pages 81-116, DOI:10.7227/lh.23.2.6.
- Moynihan SB. (2014) "'Beautiful White Girlhood'? Daisy Buchanan in Nella Larsen's Passing", African American Review, volume 47, no. 1, pages 37-49.
2013
- MOYNIHAN S. (2013) Ralina L. Joseph, Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013, £16.99). Pp. 238. ISBN 082 2 3529 23, Journal of American Studies, volume 47, no. 4, DOI:10.1017/s0021875813001928.
2012
- MOYNIHAN S. (2012) Ruth Barton (ed.), Screening Irish-America: Representing Irish-America in Film and Television (Dublin and Portland, OR: Irish Academic, 2009, £45.00/€60.00). Pp. 417. isbn 978 0 7165 2991 0, Journal of American Studies, volume 46, no. 1, pages 259-260, DOI:10.1017/s0021875811001630.
- Hufton O, Rugemer E, Elliott C, James S, Worthington H, Zakreski P, Donghaile DÓ, Knight S, Carver B, Kane L. (2012) Reviews: Social History, Local History and Historiography, Receptions and Revisitings: Review Articles, 1978–2011, Slavery and the Culture of Taste, Transatlantic Literary Exchanges, 1790–1870: Gender, Race and Nation, the Vulgar Question of Money: Heiresses, Materialism and the Novel of Manners from Jane Austen to Henry James, the Mysteries of the Cities: Urban Crime Fiction in the Nineteenth Century, Translation, Authorship and the Victorian Professional Woman: Charlotte Bronte, Harriet Martineau and George Eliot, the Lost Ireland of Stephen Gwynn: Irish Constitutional Nationalism and Cultural Politics, 1864–1950, Purity and Contamination in Late Victorian Detective Fiction, the Spectre of Utopia: Utopian and Science Fictions at the Fin de Siècle, Middlebrow Literary Cultures, the Masculine Middlebrow, 1880–1950: What Mr Miniver Read, Accented America: The Cultural Politics of Multilingual Modernism, a Sense of Shock: The Impact of Impressionism on Modern British and Irish Writing, Marianne Moore and the Cultures of Modernity, British Social Realism in the Arts since 1940, American Postmodern Fiction and the Past, the Second World War in Contemporary British Fiction: Secret Histories, 9/11 and the Literature of Terror, Literature & History, volume 21, no. 2, pages 78-111, DOI:10.7227/lh.21.2.6.
- Moynihan SB. (2012) "'Upground and belowground topographies': The Chronotopes of Skyscraper and Subway in Colum McCann's New York novels before and after 9/11", Studies in American Fiction, volume 39, no. 2, pages 269-290, DOI:10.1353/saf.2012.0007.
2011
- Moynihan SB. (2011) "The Ghost of the Real Leg": Maurice Walsh, John Ford, and Adaptation in Roddy Doyle's The Dead Republic", New Hibernia Review, volume 15, no. 1, pages 49-63.
2010
- MOYNIHAN S. (2010) James Silas Rogers and Matthew J. O'Brien (eds.), After the Flood: Irish America, 1945–1960 (Dublin: Irish Academic, 2009, £19.95). Pp. 223. isbn 0 7165 2988 2, Journal of American Studies, volume 44, no. 2, pages 443-444, DOI:10.1017/s0021875810000678.
- Moynihan S. (2010) “‘None of us will always be here’: Whiteness, Loss and Alice McDermott’s At Weddings and Wakes”, Contemporary Women's Writing, volume 4, no. 1, pages 40-54.
- Moynihan S. (2010) Passing Into the Present, Manchester Univ Pr.
2009
- Moynihan S. (2009) “Transnational ‘Tragic Mulatto’: Phil Lynott, The Nephew and Mixed Race Irishness”, Internationalist Review of Irish Culture, volume 1, pages 60-77.
- Moynihan S. (2009) “History Repeating Itself: Passing, Pudd’nhead Wilson and The President’s Daughter”, Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters, volume 32, no. 3, pages 809-821, DOI:10.1353/cal.0.0475. [PDF]
- Moynihan S. (2009) “Native Christian Syncretism in Two Louise Erdrich Novels", Mother Tongue Theologies: Poets, Novelists, Non-Western Christianity, Wipf and Stock, 211-233.
2008
- MOYNIHAN S. (2008) Susan K. Cahn, Sexual Reckonings: Southern Girls in a Troubling Age (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2007, £19.95/$29.95). Pp. 375. isbn 978 0 674 02452 6, Journal of American Studies, volume 42, no. 2, pages 359-360, DOI:10.1017/s0021875808004799.
- MOYNIHAN S. (2008) Daphne A. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910 (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006, £16.95). Pp. 475. isbn 0 8223 3722 3, Journal of American Studies, volume 42, no. 1, pages 153-153, DOI:10.1017/s0021875807004471.
- Moynihan S. (2008) “Marginal Man and Hard-Boiled Detective: Racial Passing in Robert Skinner’s Wesley Farrell Series”, Clues: A Journal of Detection, volume 26, no. 3.
- Moynihan S. (2008) “Ships in Motion: Crossing the Black and Green Atlantics in Joseph O’Connor’s Star of the Sea”, Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relati, volume 12, no. 1, pages 41-58.
- Moynihan S. (2008) “Stand(ing) Up for the Immigrants: The Work of Comedian Des Bishop”, Irish Studies Review, volume 16, no. 4, pages 403-413.
- Moynihan S. (2008) “‘War is not a Map’: Irish America, Transnationalism and Joseph O’Connor’s Redemption Falls”, Comparative American Studies, volume 6, no. 4, pages 358-373.
- Moynihan S. (2008) “Living Parchments, Human Documents: Racial Identity and Authorship in Erasure and The Bondwoman’s Narrative”, Engaging Tradition, Making It New: Essays on Teaching Recent African American Literature, Cambridge Scholars, 103-121.
2007
- MOYNIHAN S. (2007) Portia Boulware Ransom, Black Love and the Harlem Renaissance: The Novels of Nella Larsen, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and Zora Neale Hurston (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 2005, $109.95; £69.95). Pp. 212. ISBN 0 7734 5956 1. -, Journal of American Studies, volume 41, no. 1, pages 230-231, DOI:10.1017/s0021875806633458.
- Moynihan S. (2007) “‘Kissing the rod that chastised me’: Scarlett, Rhett and Miscegenation in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind”, Irish Journal of American Studies, volume 13/14, pages 123-137.
External impact and engagement
During 2021, and with Dr. Alison Garden of Queen's University Belfast, I ran a series of academic and public-facing events to mark the centenary of the birth of the Belfast-born writer, Brian Moore (1921-1999). For more information, please see our website. This project was supported by a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant,
Contributor to:
- The Kennedy Summer School, New Ross, Co. Wexford in September 2014.
- Screen Talks: In partnership with Picturehouse Cinemas, the University of Exeter’s Screen Talks brings together a fantastic programme of films selected by experts in Film, Literature, History and Culture. Introduction to The Great Gatsby (dir. Baz Luhrmann, 2013)
- Vintage Day at the Bill Douglas Museum, University of Exeter, 8 June 2013: “Going Gatsby: 1920s retro style, 1974-2013”
Contribution to discipline
From January 2015 to December 2022, I held editorial roles at the Journal of American Studies (Cambridge University Press), first as co-Associate Editor (to December 2019) and then as co-Editor-in-Chief (to December 2022).
In 2013, along with Jo Gill and Paul Williams, I co-organised the 58th BAAS Annual Conference at the University of Exeter.
I have peer-reviewed articles and full book manuscripts for the Journal of American Studies, New Hibernia Review, Irish Studies Review, Comparative American Studies, African American Review, MELUS: Multiethnic Literatures of the United States, Cork University Press, Manchester University Press, Routledge and Syracuse University Press.
Media
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“Checking in to the in-between worlds of Brian Moore,” Irish Times 12 Jan. 2021: 9.
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“An exploration of quietly heroic lives of Catholic women in Brooklyn,” Review of Alice McDermott’s The Ninth Hour, Irish Times 21 Oct. 2017 (print and online).
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“Women Writers and Irish-American Literature” series for the Irish Times (online edition) to celebrate the centenary of Maeve Brennan’s birth (6 January 1917). This was curated by my colleague Dr. Ellen McWilliams. My contribution was devoted to Alice McDermott.
- "Mapping Ireland's Cultural Diaspora," edited by Martin Doyle for the Irish Times in November 2016. My article (online edition) was entitled "Christ and Caesar: Thematic Threads in International Irish Fiction."
Teaching
I teach across the whole curriculum, from first year right through to M.A. My research interests in American literature are reflected in my contributions to Empire of Liberty: American Literature, 1776 to present (level 2), Harlem and After: African American Literature, 1925-present (level 3) and The Literature of Cold War America (M.A.). Meanwhile, my contribution to Crossing the Water: Transatlantic Literary Relations (level 2) is greatly informed by my interests in American, Transatlantic and Irish Literatures.
I have also supervised undergraduate and M.A. dissertations on a wide range of topics.
Modules taught
- EAS1037 - The Novel
- EAS1040 - Academic English
- EAS2104 - Crossing the Water: Transatlantic Literary Relations
- EAS3003 - Dissertation
- EAS3241 - Harlem and After: African American Literature 1925-present
- EASM023 - Dissertation
- EASM157 - The Literature of Cold War America
Biography
I have completed a B.A. in English and French (N.U.I., Galway, 2000), an M.A.in English (University College Cork, 2002) and a Ph.D. in American Studies (University of Nottingham, 2007). In 2007, I was awarded an Early Career Fellowship by the Leverhulme Trust, which I undertook at the University of Nottingham. I was appointed to the University of Exeter as a Lecturer in Twentieth-Century Literature in 2010 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2019.