Colleen Taylor

Dr. Colleen Taylor specializes in eighteenth-century Irish literature, culture, and the new materialisms. Her research examines the development of Irish literature by focusing on the agency of objects both in and outside of the text. At Notre Dame, she will pursue a book project that explores how new materialist theory can expand the discipline of Irish Studies by forging new methods for recognizing colonial resistance and colonial thinking. Her current research analyzes how objects—namely, coins, flax, spinning wheels, and mud—contributed to the feminization of Irish national character and the emergence of a deep-thinking, psychological subject in Irish fiction between 1740 and 1830. In addition to providing a model of novelistic subjectivity unique to Irish literature, her project foregrounds a less anthropocentric understanding of Irish colonial culture in the long eighteenth century.

Dr. Taylor has published several articles on eighteenth and nineteenth-century British and Irish literature and material culture, including “Reading Post-Union Material Culture: ‘the Bodkin is particularly deserving our notice’” (Éire-Ireland, 2018), “Feminist Fancy in the National Tale” (Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 2018), and “Austen Answers the Irish Question” (Persuasions, 2017). She also contributed a book chapter called “Sydney Owenson, Alicia Sheridan Le Fanu, and the Domestic Stage of Post-Union Politics” to the edited collection Ireland, Enlightenment, and the English Stage (Cambridge UP, 2019, ed. D. O’Shaughnessy).

Dr. Taylor earned her PhD in English from Boston College in 2020, where she was the recipient of the Dalsimer Irish Studies Fellowship and the Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences Dissertation Fellowship. Dr. Taylor also holds an M.Phil in Irish Writing from Trinity College Dublin and a BA from Fordham University, where she was Valedictorian of her graduating class in 2012. The recipient of a Government of Ireland Fellowship at UCC and the Queens University Belfast Irish Studies Exchange Fellowship, Dr. Taylor has researched internationally in Ireland and the U.S. As a PhD student, she also received the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures’ Margaret MacCurtain Scholarship and initiated an annual Irish Studies conference called “Comhfhios” (“knowledge together”) hosted by Boston College.

At University College Cork and Boston College, Dr. Taylor has been an instructor of classes ranging from eighteenth and nineteenth century Irish literature to satire and first- year writing. In 2018, she won the American Conference for Eighteenth-Century Studies Innovative Course Design Competition for her English elective, “Queens, Cathleens, and Wild Irish Girls: Women in Irish Literature before 1900.” At Boston College, she was a recipient of the Donald J. White Teaching Excellence Award in 2017.

Beyond her interests in eighteenth-century literature, Dr. Taylor has served as the Irish music columnist for the Irish Echo newspaper in New York and worked with the Justice for Magdalenes Research campaign in Ireland.