Irish Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance: Ethnography and Transatlantic Literary Culture

My research asks how the literature of Irish modernism and the Harlem Renaissance was shaped by the emergence of an ethnographic consciousness. It bridges a gap in scholarship by exploring how ethnography provided writers operating within Irish and black nationalist frameworks a means of situating their work in relation to (and in resistance to) Euro-American modernism. It considers how anthropology as a modernist discipline enabled processes of engagement, recovery and reinterpretation that placed folklore and language centre stage, and generated new models of expression and a radical political aesthetic that pushed against longstanding histories of oppression.