Catherine Gander

I research and teach modern and contemporary American literature, specialising in the intersections between written and visual texts and modes. I write across and between disciplines, publishing on literary studies, aesthetics, art history and visual theory, and word & image studies. My first monograph, Muriel Rukeyser and Documentary: The Poetics of Connection (Edinburgh UP, 2013) won the biennial book award of the Irish Association for American Studies.  I continue to publish on Rukeyser's wide-ranging work, editing a special issue of Textual Practice on her remarkable treatise, The Life of Poetry (2018), publishing an essay in the LA Review of Books (LARB), and currently editing, with Stefania Heim, a creative-critical hybrid book exploring Rukeyser's continuing relevance, called Beyond Ourselves: Contemporary Poets on Muriel Rukeyser.

From 2019-2023, I was Chair of the all-island Irish Association for American Studies (IAAS). In 2023-2024, I share this role with Dr Kate Fama (UCD). 

From 2021-2023, I was co-Associate Dean of Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) for the Faculty of Arts, Celtic Studies, and Philosophy. Professor Moynagh Sullivan and I applied for this role jointly in order to model a gender-responsive and flexible method of collaborative leadership. In this role, I was also the co-chair of the Faculty Self-Assessment Team for our successful Athena SWAN Bronze Award application, and first chair of the Implementation Group for the Gender Action Plan.

I came to Maynooth after 4.5 years lecturing at Queen's University Belfast, where I established the Research Centre for the Americas and the American MA pathway. Before that, I held teaching posts at the University of Nottingham and UEA after completing my PhD at King's College London in early 2009.

Also a poet, my publications include Matches (Verve Poetry Press, 2024) and Sea Between Us (with Georgia Hilton and Anna Kisby, Nine Pens Press, 2022).

Current book projects include:

- Extending the Document: Contemporary Transmedial Poetics (under contract with Cambridge University Press), which takes as its starting point Muriel Rukeyser's dictum that 'poetry can extend the document' to consider poetry that works in a documentary vein to materialise language in various ways, often via visual, installation, and conceptual art. 
- Beyond Ourselves: Contemporary Poets on Muriel Rukeyser (edited with Stefania Heim; under contract with West Virginia University Press), a creative/critical hybrid book that responds to Rukeyser's lasting legacy, exploring the models she provides for living, thinking, writing, and resisting in our own social, political, and poetic moment.

I was PI on the Irish Research Council-funded New Foundations project: Diversifying Irish Poetry: Poetry Critics of Colour in Ireland (2021-22).
 
Previous funded projects include the AHRC and PaCCS-funded project 'LGBTQ Visions of Peace in a Society Emerging from Conflict'. This project's creative outcomes, including a photography exhibition and theatre performance, were launched during Belfast's Queer Arts Festival, Outburst, in November 2017, at Belfast Exposed and TheatreofplucK.

My pronouns are she/her.

Supervision: 

I have supervised and mentored research projects at doctoral and postdoctoral level on the subjects of post-9/11 American literature, ecofeminist apocalyptic literature, modernist word-image texts, contemporary literature and neoliberalism, feminist and anti-racist poetry, Teju Cole, poetry and extractivism, poetry and sleep.
I would be happy to receive PhD proposals in the areas of:

• documentary poetics
• word-image intersections
• contemporary American poetry or fiction 
• modern American poetry or fiction
• American visual culture 
• creative writing (poetry)