Pat Palmer

Patricia Palmer works on cultures in contact in, principally, early modern Ireland, on the conflictual exchange between English colonists and the Gaelic world, on linguistic colonisation, the aesthetics of violence, and the politics of translation. There is a strong comparative element to her work: she has written on translations of Ariosto, Ercilla, and Virgil, and on bardic poetry. She is the author of Language and Conquest in Early Modern Ireland: English Renaissance Literature and Elizabeth Imperial Expansion (Cambridge University Press, 2001) and The Severed Head and the Grafted Tongue: Translating Violence in Early Modern Ireland (Cambridge University Press, 2014). She has published articles with English Literary Renaissance, Translation Studies, Renaissance Quarterly, Irish Historical Studies, and Literature Compass. Early Modern Criticism in a Time of Crisis which she edited with David Baker was published in November 2022. Her current book project is a study of the polyphonic and intersecting literary cultures of early modern Ireland, Her current book project is a monograph provisionally entitled The Poetics of Property: Castle Poems and the Invention of Ownership in Early Modern Ireland. 

After graduating with an MA from University College Cork, she worked in Athens and Brussels before taking a D.Phil. in English literature at the University of Oxford. She was Senior Lecturer in the University of York (2000-2008) and Reader in King’s College London (2008-2016) and took up the chair of Renaissance Literature in Maynooth in 2017. 

She was awarded an Advanced Laureate by the Irish Research Council in 2019 and is Principal Investigator on the MACMORRIS Project, a four-year DH project which seeks to map the full range of cultural activity, across languages and ethnic groups, in early modern Ireland.