Joseph Lennon

I specialize in Irish Studies, and my research generally follows the influence of colonialism and its effects in Ireland, Britain, and India. My current book project, “Hunger Circles,” traces the pre-history of the modern hunger strike in those countries, as well as in Russia, up to 1909 when Marion Wallace-Dunlop performed the first women’s hunger strike for suffrage. My present research focuses on how to read lived realities of Gujaratis during an early nineteenth-century famine in the reports by British colonial administrators. The larger book project, traces fasting and protest traditions through a range of extra-literary texts: histories, judicial diaries, academic studies, newspaper articles, as well as the more literary genres of autobiographies, plays, novels, and poetry. I am especially interested in how these texts, like the protests of the time, challenge established power dynamics and depicted hunger, race, gender, and violence. This work informs my other recent writing and presentations on the history and influence of whiteness on Irish identity, which focus on racist misconceptions in Irish America.

Distinct from my book project, I have written recent articles focusing more on literary contexts. “Traces of Ancient Things: W.B. Yeats and Sato’s Sword,” (in Yeats and Asia, Cork UP 2020) builds on arguments put forward by Rita Ann Felski and Jahan Ramazani about how antiquity is represented in Yeats’s Irish Orientalist poetry and drama. I have also written about how centuries-old forms are reimagined in contemporary works as in my article “Singin’ Sprees” and Death Songs: Marina Carr’s Lyrical Loss” (New Hibernia Review 2016), which focuses on Carr’s plays, By the Bog of Cats . . . . These projects have built on my earlier work, particularly Irish Orientalism: A Literary and Intellectual History (2004, 2008), which explored how medieval origin legends shaped, along with cross-colonial and imperial encounters, modern Irish writing on Asia and West Asia.

Lastly, I have published a volume of poetry, Fell Hunger with Salmon Poetry, and continue to write occasional poems and pieces on contemporary Irish art.