BOOK LAUNCH: Race, Politics, and Irish America: A Gothic History

Mary M. Burke’s Oxford University Press book, Race, Politics, and Irish America: A Gothic History, was published in the UK in December 2022 and the US in March 2023. The US release will be launched by Myles Dungan at the national ACIS conference at San José State University, California, which will run from June 7-10, 2023. 

Race, Politics, and Irish America uses the words and lives of Black and white writers and public figures of Irish connection to discuss the complex cultural and political legacies of centuries of Irish presence in the Americas, from the forcibly transported and Scots-Irish to post-Famine Catholic immigrants. 

Mary M. Burke is Professor of English and Coordinator, Irish Literature Concentration, at University of Connecticut. She has published widely on Irish and Irish American culture, minorities, and identities.  In addition, she contributed editing and the Afterword to the Tramp Press 2022 reissue of Juanita Casey’s The Horse of Selene, which she and Deirdre Flynn launched at IASIL at the University of Limerick on July 26, 2022. The US launch of The Horse of Selene, with Caroline Heafey and Kelly Sullivan, was hosted by Glucksman Ireland House, NYU, on April 27, 2023.. Her public-facing and creative work has placed with NPR, the Irish Times, RTÉ, and Faber, and she has formerly been University of Notre Dame NEH Keough-Naughton Fellow, Trinity College Dublin LHR Visiting Fellow, MLA Irish Literature Committee chair, and NE-ACIS President. She is a graduate of TCD and Queen’s University, Belfast.