Author Dara Downey

Dara Downey

Dara Downey is a visiting lecturer in the School of English, Trinity College Dublin, and the Trinity Access Programme. She is editor of The Irish Gothic Journal (online). She is author of American Women's Ghost Stories in the Gilded Age (2014), and co-editor of Landscapes of Liminality: Between Space and Place (with Ian Kinane and Elizabeth Parker, 2016). Her research focuses on domesticity in American gothic, and she is currently working on a literary biography of Shirley Jackson, as well as a longer-term project on servant figures in American gothic.

From Dangerous Outsiders to Beloved Innocents: Irish Servant Figures in American Gothic

Dara Downey

Articles

In Georgia Wood Pangborn’s 1911 short story “Broken Glass,” the narrator, a fussy mother living somewhere in rural America, is reproached by a mysterious figure for having scolded her young Irish nursemaid. As ... Read More...

Review: Desirée Henderson, Grief and Genre in American Literature, 1790-1870

Dara Downey

Reviews

“[…] the many genres of grief underscore the magnitude of the challenge of making death meaningful, as the unique and individual nature of loss runs up against the dominant conventions that shape memorial traditions and practices” (4).

"The Product of a Spoiled America": Divorce as Collective Crisis in U.S. Popular Culture of the 1990s

‘The Ethics of Quantum Colonialism’: Navigating American Racial Anxiety in N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became

“‘Normal People’ Indeed!”: Anne Tyler, Sally Rooney, and the Narrative of Youthful Quirk

Depictions of Shame: White Identity and Cultural Blackness in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner

Satire, Symbolism, and the “Working Through” of Historical Ghosts in The Confidence-Man

The Populist Turn in American Politics: A Review-Essay of Kivisto’s The Trump Phenomenon

On Becoming an Americanist

Review: Wickham Clayton, ed, Style and Form in the Hollywood Slasher Film

Review: Christian Schmidt, Postblack Aesthetics: The Freedom to be Black in Contemporary African American Fiction.

Review: Leopold Lippert, Performing America Abroad

Review: Kloeckner, Knewitz, and Sielke, eds., Knowledge Landscapes North America

Review: T. H. Breen, The Will of the People: The Revolutionary Birth of America

The Populist Turn in American Politics: A Review-Essay of Kivisto’s The Trump Phenomenon

Review: Andy Connolly, Philip Roth and the American Liberal Tradition

The IAAS's Americanista: An Interview with Catherine Gander (IAAS Chair)

From Mitchelstown to Michigan: Kevin Roche’s Formative Years

From Dangerous Outsiders to Beloved Innocents: Irish Servant Figures in American Gothic

Review: Desirée Henderson, Grief and Genre in American Literature, 1790-1870