People

This project is led by Dr Sarah Comyn. Dr Comyn is a Lecturer/ Assistant Professor and Ad Astra Fellow in the UCD School of English, Drama and Film. Her work explores the relationship between literature and value; where value is considered as aesthetic, economic, social, ethical and/or political. She was previously an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow (2018-20), and a European Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow (2016-18) on the SouthHem Project led by Professor Porscha Fermanis.

She has recently published two books: Political Economy and the Novel: A Literary History of “Homo Economicus” (Palgrave 2018), and Early Public Libraries and Colonial Citizenship in the British Southern Hemisphere (2019: with Lara Atkin, Porscha Fermanis and Nathan Garvey). She has also published an article, ‘Literary Sociability on the Goldfields: The Mechanics’ Institute in the Colony of Victoria, 1854–1870’ in the Journal of Victorian Culture.

You can email Dr Comyn at sarah.comyn[at]ucd.ie and follow her on Twitter here

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This project is mentored by Professor Porscha Fermanis. Prof Fermanis completed her undergraduate degree in English and Law at the University of Western Australia, and her PhD in English at the University of Oxford. Her books include: John Keats and the Ideas of the Enlightenment (Edinburgh, 2009); Rethinking British Romantic History (Oxford, 2014; ed. with John Regan); Romanticism: A Literary and Cultural History (Routledge, 2016; with Carmen Casaliggi). Forthcoming books include: Worlding the South: Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture and the British Southern Colonies (Manchester, 2020; ed. with Sarah Comyn) and Romantic Pasts: History, Fiction, and Feeling in Britain and Ireland, 1770-1850.

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