A Greenhouse Research Talk by Claire Connolly, University College Cork
Coastlines connected the British empire, and not just because of the network of significant ports along which flowed people and property. Impoverished stretches of the coast in Ireland, Scotland and Wales played their part too in sustaining imperial power. My paper explores the idea that the complex relationship between Ireland, Britain and the empire — a matter of overlaps, connections, complicity and contradictions — can be mapped out of in terms of the entangled histories of coasts, seeds, plants and gardens.
Claire Connolly is Professor of Modern English at University College Cork in Ireland. She has been O’Brien Professor at Concordia University in Montreal, Parnell Fellow at Magdalene College, Cambridge and Burns Scholar in Irish Studies at Boston College. Connolly has published extensively on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ireland and has research interests in the environmental humanities. With Marjorie Howes, she is General Editor of the six volume series, Irish Literature in Transition, 1700-2020 published by Cambridge University Press in 2020. For the Royal Irish Academy, she is Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Secretary and sits on its Council.