Mary Mullen

I teach and write about nineteenth-century English and Irish literature, drawing on critical race theory, colonial studies, queer and feminist theory to question assumptions about institutions, representation, and public politics. My book, Novel Institutions: Anachronism, Irish Novels, and Nineteenth-Century Realism (Edinburgh University Press, 2019) rethinks the politics of institutions by reinterpreting the most institutional of literary forms: nineteenth-century British realism. Although realist novels, like institutions, mediate social life through a set of formal conventions and informal expectations, they also offer strategies for more capacious political imagining through their prevalent anachronisms. These anachronisms—untimely chronologies, obsolete practices, and out-of-date characters—unsettle the shared time of institutions and the consensus it fosters. Novel Institutions gives unprecedented attention to Irish novels by Maria Edgeworth, Charles Kickham, William Carleton, and George Moore and offers new readings of canonical novels by George Eliot and Charles Dickens. It won the Robert Rhodes Prize for Books on Literature from the American Conference for Irish Studies.

Building on my ongoing work to consider the problems and possibilities of publics, my second book project, The Colonial Politics of Public Interest, investigates nineteenth-century constructions of public interest in literature, liberal theory, and cultural discourses. It argues that public interest serves empire by transforming self-interest into apparent disinterestedness. Covering writing by Jane Wilde, Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hughes, George Eliot, Margaret Oliphant, and others, the book focuses on a series of cases—governmental responses to the Great Irish Famine of 1845-51, university reform of Oxford and Cambridge in 1850s, and British interventions in Palestine, from the establishment of a British consulate in Jerusalem in 1838 to the Balfour Declaration of 1917. Each of these cases show that public interest is a strategy for managing minority and colonial difference in an era of globalization.