PhD Night

The PhD night gives the opportunity for two ECRs to present their work in tandem. 

Killian Beashel 

Artists’ Books in Ireland and the “Curse of Rurality”

“Ireland,” mused the poet and publisher Simon Cutts in a 2012 British Library interview reminiscing on his move from Norfolk to Co. Tipperary in the late 1990s, “was more destitute in an interesting kind of way, was more dishevelled in a certain way that I really admired [. . .] more mouldable in some way.” This ‘mouldable destitution’ became an animating conceptual force for Coracle Press, which Cutts has operated for almost three decades with US-born artist Erica Van Horn from their home near Clonmel. Cutts and Van Horn are by no means the only figures in the field of artists’ books publishing to have adopted the rural and the peripheral as constitutive of their publishing practice. Nevertheless, their work offers a beguiling case study underscoring the potentialities and the pitfalls of the rural (from the conceptual, to the formal, to the economic) as they were explored by among the most prominent of artists’ books publishers in Britain and Ireland. The artists’ book, melding as it does the verbal and the visual, the textual and the haptic, and circumventing as it does the received channels of literary and artistic prestige, is a form which operates upon a deliberately marginal, fugitive aesthetic. As a result, rurality and peripherality, both concepts with contested histories of their own, become for artists’ books in Ireland laden with generative potential. 

Bio

Killian Beashel is a PhD student in the Department of English Language and Literature at University College London, funded by UCL’s Research Excellence Scholarship. His doctoral thesis will present the first systematic literary-historical account of artists’ book publishing in Ireland from the mid-1980s to the present. Since joining UCL, he has been awarded the British Association for Irish Studies Bursary Prize (2024) and the Beinecke Library Research Fellowship for Graduate Students (2025-26) at Yale University. He is the organiser of an upcoming conference due to be held in June 2025 entitled ‘Artists’ Books: Structures/Infrastructures’, funded by a grant from the Association for Art History. He graduated from Trinity College Dublin (2021) with a BA in English Studies, and from the University of St Andrews (2022) with an MLitt in Modern and Contemporary Literature and Culture. 

 

 

 

Sophie O’Grady 

‘“An Abomination, a Plague, an Indescribable Evil”: The Difficulty of ‘Bad Books’ in Pre-Censorship Ireland’

 

‘There appears to be a tendency here not to condemn immoral or obscene books,’ observed John Joseph Byrne at a 1928 Dáil Éireann debate. ‘Why? We can condemn anything we like as far as the State is concerned – the sale of bad meat, the sale of drink […] – but we cannot condemn the sale of improper or immoral literature.’ Byrne was far from the first to comment on the lack of official literary censorship in the nascent Irish state – calls for stricter control over the publication and circulation of a certain ‘class’ of literature predate Irish independence by some years – but it was only with the legislative freedom afforded by state sovereignty that the question could be properly considered and possibly resolved. This was not to be an entirely straightforward task given the discursive nature of the topic at hand: there was little accord amongst anyone, public or parliament, as to the necessity of censorship, the particulars of its parameters, the ethics of the endeavour or, most pressingly of all, the specific ‘sin’ that might be said to be ‘improper’ or ‘immoral’ in literature. The context out of which censorship came to be was so varied – touching as it did on postcolonial identity construction, cultural heritage preservation and natio-religious radicalism amongst myriad other sociohistorical concerns – that there could be no one answer to any of these questions. It was, however, the difficulty of definition that was most perplexing, and most productive in cementing and codifying what would become Irish literary censorship.

 

Bio

 

Sophie O’Grady is a PhD Candidate in the Department of English at King’s College London. Her research is centred around the operation of state-sponsored literary censorship across the island of Ireland during the post-war-pre-Troubles period, with her thesis arguing the existence of a critically productive dynamic between state censorship and culminations of violence in mid-twentieth century Irish literature. Her work touches on topics of cultural nationalism and religious radicalism as key features of the sociopolitical climate underlying the moral safeguarding campaigns of the young Irish state; her previous experience in archival studies has largely informed her current research, which stands as the first piece of scholarship in the field to make such extensive use of relevant archival holdings. She completed her undergraduate studies at Trinity College Dublin (2024), where she was awarded a First Class Honours in English Studies.

Unless stated otherwise, all our events are free of charge and anyone interested in the topic is welcome to attend. Registration is required for all events. Please sign up using the booking form below.