Dr Nora Moroney

Munby Fellow 2022-23

Nora Moroney completed her PhD in the School of English, Trinity College Dublin in 2018, examining the role of Irish writers in the late-Victorian British periodical press. Her research interests are in the areas of print culture, publishing history, transnational Irish writing and book collectors.

She completed an Irish Research Council postdoctoral project (2020-2022) on a cultural history of the Benjamin Iveagh Library at Farmleigh House, Dublin. This research explored one of the most important private collections in twentieth-century Ireland, analysing its holdings of fine bindings, early Gaelic printing and first editions of modernist Irish writers. She has previously held a research post in the Manuscripts Department of the National Library of Ireland, working on collections of nineteenth-century estate papers and twentieth-century literary archives. She has published on Irish women journalists, the Belfast press in the twentieth century and Irish institutional collecting.

In 2022 she was awarded a visiting fellowship to the Huntington Library, California, and was the recipient of the 2017 RSVP Gale Dissertation Research Fellowship in Nineteenth Century Media.

Munby Fellow Project:
An Irish Book Collector? The Henry Bradshaw Collection in Context

This project focuses on the book collecting of Henry Bradshaw, bibliographer and librarian of Cambridge University Library from 1867 to 1886. His antiquarian interests broadly focused on rare Irish imprints, Gaelic type and material from Ulster from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. The collection, as donated to the Library by Bradshaw in 1870 and 1886, constitutes a rare and valuable example of an extant (Anglo-) Irish book collection. This research considers the vision, rationale and motivations surrounding Bradshaw’s collecting efforts in the context of Irish print culture and questions of national identity.

Furthermore, it ties together the practices of private book collecting and institutional acquisition. Analysing Bradshaw’s personal papers and correspondence demonstrates how his prodigious bibliographical scholarship drew from direct experience with the rare book trade and collating a personal library. It illuminates the many interactions and intersections between public and private collecting practices in the nineteenth century. Using the Bradshaw collection as a case example, the project considers the afterlives of private libraries beyond the general narrative of decline, dispersal or destruction.

Recent publications:

• ‘Institutional libraries and book collecting practices in Ireland, 1960-2000’, Irish University Review 52.1 (2022)
• ‘Dictionaries, translations and the turn to antiquity in the Benjamin Iveagh Library’, Éire-Ireland 57.2 (Fall/Winter 2022)
• ‘Charlotte Grace O’Brien’, in Irish Women Poets Rediscovered: Readings in Poetry from 18th - 20th Century, ed. Maria Johnston and Conor Linnie (Cork: Cork University Press, 2021)
• ‘A Century of Change in the Belfast Press, 1900-2000’ (co-authored with Stephen O’Neill), in The Edinburgh History of the British and Irish Press, Volume 3: Competition and Disruption, 1900-2017, ed. Martin Conboy & Adrian Bingham (Edinburgh University Press, 2020)
• ‘Irish Writers and the Nineteenth Century: Gendering an International Outlook’, Victorian Periodicals Review 51.3 (Fall 2018)