Catherine Gander

Hello!

I am Associate Dean of Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion for the Faculty of Arts, Celtic Studies, and Philosophy. I share this role with my colleague, Prof. Moynagh Sullivan, and our decision to jointly apply for the position was not least in order to model a gender-responsive and flexible method of collaborative leadership. 

In my role as EDI Associate Dean, I am also the co-chair of the Faculty Self-Assessment Team for the Athena SWAN Bronze Award application, and first chair of the Implementation Group for the Gender Action Plan.

I am the Chair of the all-island Irish Association for American Studies (IAAS)

My research and teaching are in 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.

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.
 
My first monograph, Muriel Rukeyser and Documentary: The Poetics of Connection (Edinburgh University Press, 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, featuring a host of wonderful, award-winning poets.

My research in the areas of embodiment and phenomenology, aesthetics, critical race studies, and intertextuality has led to recent work on contemporary authors and artists, including Don DeLillo, Claudia Rankine, and Carrie Mae Weems. I am interested in the ways in which these artists and others blend formal experimentations with positions of political and cultural resistance.    

My 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. 
- The Edinburgh Companion to Don DeLillo and the Arts (in press with EUP: August 2023), which brings together 31 renowned and emerging international DeLillo scholars to consider in extended essays DeLillo's myriad engagements with the visual, plastic, performing, digital, and spatial arts. 
- 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.
- Matches, a poetry book under contract with Verve Poetry Press for publication February 2024.

I was PI on the Irish Research Council-funded New Foundations project: Diversifying Irish Poetry: Poetry Critics of Colour in Ireland (2021).
 
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.

I have supervised research projects 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, and most recently, on the wide-ranging written and photographic work of Teju Cole. 
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