You are here Staff

Dr Sinéad Moriarty B.A. (DUB), M.A. & Ph.D. (London) Teaching Fellow in Children's Literature

sinead-moriarty

Research and Teaching Interests

Research

I completed my B.A. in Trinity College Dublin before pursuing an M.A. and Ph.D. at the National Centre for Research in Children’s Literature in the University of Roehampton, London.
My research has primarily focused on representations of landscape and the idea of wilderness in children’s literature. Focusing on the Antarctic as a case study landscape my Ph.D. research explored over a century of literary representations of Antarctica for child readers. I am interested in how wilderness is conceptualised, the use of maps in literature, and how texts for children represent ecophobic or ecophilic attitudes towards landscapes and the natural world.

My work has also focused on depictions of heroism and masculinity in children’s literature, and latent imperialism in modern British children’s literature.

I am also interested in representations of disability in Victorian literature, in particular Victorian fundraising materials as literary documents reflecting contemporary attitudes towards illness and disability. I founded the archives of the Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability (RHN) in London (originally established as the Royal Hospital for Incurables in 1854). I secured pilot funding from the Wellcome Trust for a scoping study, and project funding from the Heritage Lottery Funding to support the creation of a public archive service and series of engagement events and activities. I have run outreach events and given public lectures about the history of the RHN and the broader place of the hospital in Victorian medical history.

Teaching

I teach undergraduate and postgraduate courses in children’s literature for the School of English. I contribute to the Freshman modules ‘Writing Childhoods’ and ‘Children’s Literature’, as well as teaching on the core course in the MPhil in Children’s literature.

Publications

‘“What a Crusoe crowd we shall make!”: Destabilising Imperialist Attitudes to Space in G. Warren Payne’s Three Boys in Antarctica’. Didactics and the Modern Robinsonade. Ian Kinane (Ed). Liverpool University Press. 2019.
‘Journey’ RoundTable: Journal of English and Creative Writing, Vol 1. Editor. May 2017. https:// roundtable.ac.uk/
‘Unstable Space: Mapping the Antarctic for Children in "Heroic Era" Antarctic Literature’. Children's Literature in Education, Vol. 48.1. pp. 56-72. March 2017.
‘Anti-colonialism in Geraldine McCaughrean’s The White Darkness’. The Final Chapters: Concluding Papers of The Journal of Children’s Literature Studies. October 2013, Wizard Tower Press.
‘Dog-food for Dinner: Food and Cannibalism in Heroic-Era Antarctic Narratives’. Feast or Famine? Food and Children's Literature. Cambridge Scholastic Press, June 2014.