2022-23

Mary Burke

Mary Burke is Professor of English at the University of Connecticut, where she directs its Irish Literature Concentration. Her book, Race, Politics, and Irish-America: A Gothic History, will publish with Oxford UP in December 2022, as did her 2009 cultural history of Irish Travellers. She wrote the Afterword to Tramp Press’s 2022 reissue of British-Irish Traveller-Romany Juanita Casey’s novel, The Horse of Selene.

Burke’s public-facing and creative work has placed with NPR, the Irish Times, RTÉ, and Faber. She is a former University of Notre Dame NEH Keough-Naughton Fellow and MLA Irish Literature Committee chair.

Her Trinity Long Room Hub project, Bohemian Ireland, explores post-war Ireland’s dispersed, creative, and colourful expatriate scene. It embraced traditions that mainstream Ireland then considered dated, unprofitable, or “disreputable,” seeding the eventual embrace of land stewardship, multiculturalism, and traditional foodways. Most central to the project, denizens from Casey and Donleavy to Böll and Glassie produced insightful writing about Ireland.