James Smith
Professor of English & Irish Studies
Biography
Specializes in Irish literature and culture, especially contemporary narrative, and cultural studies. His graduate seminars include "Contemporary Irish Fiction," "Twentieth Century Irish Fiction," and "Ireland and Britain: Kingdom, Colony, Nation?” His undergraduate electives include "Reading Irish Childhood," "Family and Kinship: Reading the Adopted Child," “Boom, Bust, Austerity: Reading Ireland from the Celtic Ireland to Now,” “Outcast Ireland: Paupers, Penitents, Patients,” "Major Irish Writers," and both 19th and 20th century surveys of Irish literature. He has published articles in Signs, The Journal of the History of Sexuality, Éire-Ireland, and ELH. His book, Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries and the Nation’s Architecture of Containment (Notre Dame UP/Manchester UP), was published in 2007 and was awarded the Donald Murphy Prize for Distinguished First Book by the American Conference for Irish Studies. With Maria Luddy, he coedited a double special issue of Éire-Ireland (Spring/Summer 2009) and the collection Children, Childhood, and Irish Society: 1500 to the Present (Four Courts Press, 2014). He recently coedited a double special issue of Éire-Ireland (Spring/Summer 2020) and the essay collection REDRESS: Ireland's Institutions and Transitional Justice , both of which consider the ongoing legacies of institutional abuse in Ireland. He is a member of the advocacy group Justice for Magdalenes Research ( JFMR ) and co-author of Ireland and the Magdalene Laundries: A Campaign for Justice (Bloomsbury, 2021).