Joseph Nugent
Professor of the Practice
Biography
Professor Nugent’s interests lie at the confluence of Irish Studies, Joyce Studies, and the Digital Humanities. Each year he devotes a semester to original explorations of James Joyce’s Ulysses. In addition to senior seminars on Dubliners and Flann O’Brien, he has designed core courses on subjects such as the English boarding school novel, the politics of empire, and Irish Modernism. His Digital Humanities courses explore ways in which GIS and off-the-shelf digital text analysis tools can enhance our students’ experience of space, actual and literary. He is currently managing an Advanced Topic Seminar exploring VR and immersive technologies. Each semester Professor Nugent teaches courses in modern Irish language, introductory and intermediate. This semester he will lead Explore the Irish - an Introduction to Irish Studies, the first such class at Boston College. Professor Nugent's technological projects exploit Joyce's texts as windows onto the social and cultural life of fin-de-siecle Dublin. This classroom-laboratory approach has generated products such as the iPhone app, JoyceWays, the e-book Digital Dubliners, and the Dubliners Bookshelf. His digital guide and his 3D immersion experience appeared in Making it Irish, at the McMullen Museum in 2016 and in Boston College Ireland. His article have appeared in, among other publications, Victorian Studies, The Senses and Society, and Éire-Ireland. His devotion to Joyce is also reflected in Raidin the Wake, his “Finnegans Wake” reading group, and in the Boston Joyce Forum conferences which he runs annually.