Dr Christina Morin
Visiting Research Fellow -
Irish Collections in the Library of Trinity College Dublin and Cambridge University Library
Email: christina.morin@ul.ie
Dr. Tina Morin holds a BA from Georgetown University, with a Major in English literature, and a PhD in English from Trinity College Dublin. Before joining the University of Limerick (UL) in 2012, she held an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at Trinity College Dublin (2010-12) and a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in the Institute of Irish Studies at Queen's University Belfast (2009-10). She also taught in the School of English at University College Cork (2007-09).
She is currently an Associate Professor of English and Assistant Dean of Research in the Faculty of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at UL. Tina's research interests centre on Romantic-era Irish gothic literature, book history, and Irish women's writing. She is the author of The Gothic Novel in Ireland, c. 1760-1829 (2018) and Charles Robert Maturin and the Haunting of Irish Romantic Fiction (2011).
Other publications include Irish Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion (2023; edited with Jarlath Killeen); a special issue of the Irish University Review on 'Irish Gothic Studies Today' (May, 2023; edited with Ellen Scheible); Traveling Irishness in the Long Nineteenth Century (2017; edited with Marguerite Corporaal); and Irish Gothics: Genres, Forms, Modes and Traditions (2014; edited with Niall Gillespie). Tina is Chair of the International Association of Irish Literatures (IASIL) and co-editor of the journal Eighteenth-Century Ireland.
Visiting Fellow Project:
Irish Gothic in the Global Nineteenth Century
As a fellow at Trinity and Cambridge, Tina will be working on a monograph project titled Irish Gothic in the Global Nineteenth Century. The project explores the impact of Romantic-era Irish gothic fiction in the nineteenth-century global literary marketplace, focusing in particular on Irish-authored novels published by the London-based Minerva Press in the period 1780-1829. The leading publisher of popular fiction in London in the Romantic-era, the Minerva Press is nevertheless largely occluded in scholarship of the period, in part because of its association with genre fiction, including the critically derided but popularly acclaimed gothic romance.
Minerva’s Irish authors number among the press’s most popular and prolific writers. Yet, despite numerous reprints, editions, and translations that attest to the widespread appeal of works such as Regina Maria Roche’s The Children of the Abbey (1796), Catharine Selden’s The English Nun (1797), and Charles Lucas’s The Infernal Quixote (1801), the vast majority of Irish-authored Minerva novels have been marginalised in the historiography of Irish literature. This book project seeks to recover these works and their authors to view, resituating them prominently in Irish literary history, and producing a new conceptual mapping of the bibliographic worlds that they helped to shape and in which they were circulated, re-packaged, translated, and intertextually evoked to an extent currently invisible in literary historiography.
At Cambridge, Tina will consult the library's holdings of first edition Irish Minerva fictions, later editions and translations of these works, and non-Irish authored Minerva novels. She will focus in particular on the material history of these novels, examining bookplates and marginalia as evidence of readers' engagement with these texts.
"The TCD-Cambridge Short-Term Visiting Research Fellowship has been an absolutely invaluable experience for me. It has provided the opportunity to consult a large number of Irish Minerva editions and to gain valuable insight into the very different reading communities and contexts represented by the collections at each institution.
While CUL’s Minerva books tend to be legal deposit copies in pristine condition – some even with their pages uncut – TCD’s copies are later acquisitions showing significant signs of wear and bearing more frequent indications of readerly engagement, such as marginalia. The copies in both libraries thus contribute to a really nuanced view of the readers who may have read these editions as well as the archival practices that have ensured their preservation today.
Alongside facilitating hands-on research, the fellowship has provided that rare pleasure: time to think and to write outside the usual pressures of academic life. In that sense, it has advanced my research more significantly in two months than has been possible for some time."
Dr Christina Morin
Watch Dr Christina Morin, detail her research in this short video:
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