- Department of English
MSC03 2170
1 University of New Mexico
Albuquerque, NM 87131-0001
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sltownse@unm.edu
Sarah L Townsend
University of New Mexico, English Department, Faculty Member
- Sarah L. Townsend (Ph.D. UC Berkeley) is an Associate Professor of English and co-founder of the Irish Studies Progra... moreSarah L. Townsend (Ph.D. UC Berkeley) is an Associate Professor of English and co-founder of the Irish Studies Program at the University of New Mexico. The adopted Korean granddaughter of Irish-American immigrants, her current research and teaching centers on race and the transnational formation of Irish identity. Townsend is co-editor of a forthcoming volume on the Irish Bildungsroman (with Gregory Castle and Matthew Reznicek, Syracuse UP) and author of a dozen published and forthcoming articles on topics including Irish women’s genre fiction, Muslim community theatre in Ireland, the evolution of literary genres, ethnic neighborhoods in the United States, Black and Irish Traveller hair cultures, and multicultural sequels and adaptations. Her monograph-in-progress, What’s New about the New Irish? Immigration, Whiteness, and Racial Mobility in Ireland and the United States, 1892-2020, reevaluates contemporary Irish multiculturalism by tracing its surprising origins in 19th and 20th-century Irish-American white supremacy. Drawing on extensive archival research in Ireland and North America, the project shows how the present-day celebration of so-called “new Irish” immigrants in Ireland paradoxically derives from an older racial vocabulary developed in the United States to support Irish immigrants—who were assigned a qualified variety of whiteness upon arrival—in securing a firm place in the white majority.
Townsend has held major residential fellowships at Wellesley College’s Newhouse Center for the Humanities (2019-20) and the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at Notre Dame (2014-15). She has delivered invited lectures in a variety of venues including the Galway International Arts Festival, the Irish Consulate, NUI Galway, Villanova, Notre Dame, Boston College, Dartmouth, and the 2020 American Conference for Irish Studies, where she gave the keynote address. She serves on the Executive Committee of the MLA Irish Literature Forum and is Past President of the American Conference for Irish Studies, West. At UNM, Townsend teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on Irish, British, and world literature; theories of race and globalization; and graduate professionalization. She supervises Ph.D. and M.A. students, co-directs the Irish Studies Program’s summer study abroad and alumni travel programs, and organizes Irish Studies events programming.edit
Keynote address, 2022 Comhfhios Conference, hosted by Boston College.
Webinar on Irish-American lobbying & U.S. immigration reform. Hosted by NUI Galway Irish Studies and the Moore Institute for Research in the Humanities and Social Studies.
Webinar on race, the New Irish, and diversity in Irish Studies. Hosted by Boston College Ireland, 26 Feb. 2021.
Keynote address, 2020 American Conference for Irish Studies, hosted by the University of St. Thomas, Houston, TX, April 1-5.
Lecture at Villanova University Center for Irish Studies on the after-effects of the Celtic Tiger. The collapse of Ireland's economic bubble in 2008 brought to an end the 15-year era of prosperity known as the Celtic Tiger. Sarah... more
Lecture at Villanova University Center for Irish Studies on the after-effects of the Celtic Tiger. The collapse of Ireland's economic bubble in 2008 brought to an end the 15-year era of prosperity known as the Celtic Tiger. Sarah Townsend, PhD, assistant professor of British and Irish Literary Studies at The University of New Mexico, explores Irish fiction and drama in the decade following the 2008 financial crash—demonstrating how the upswing and its aftermath has remapped narratives about risk, aspiration and human potential.
Presentation at the 2021 IRISH Seminar, hosted by the University of Notre Dame Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies.
Symposium on transatlantic formations of Irishness, hosted by the UCD Clinton Institute for American Studies and Dartmouth College. The symposium will bring together speakers from Ireland and the US to consider disruptions in... more
Symposium on transatlantic formations of Irishness, hosted by the UCD Clinton Institute for American Studies and Dartmouth College. The symposium will bring together speakers from Ireland and the US to consider disruptions in transatlantic affairs and how Irishness is being positioned and performed in relation to these. It will broadly take up questions of paradigm change occasioned or accelerated by Brexit and related disruptions in transatlantic affairs, including matters of immigration and borders, populism and ethnonationalism, and race and class discontents. And so, we hope to shape some conversations at Dartmouth around this turbulence.
Lecture at Framingham State University on the changing demographic and racial makeup of Irish society and literary responses to multiculturalism.
Lecture at the Irish Literary & Historical Society on animals in Irish literature and culture. Professor Sarah Townsend as guest speaker on Sunday April 26th, 2015 at 5pm, at the United Irish Cultural Center. A lighthearted and erudite... more
Lecture at the Irish Literary & Historical Society on animals in Irish literature and culture. Professor Sarah Townsend as guest speaker on Sunday April 26th, 2015 at 5pm, at the United Irish Cultural Center. A lighthearted and erudite exploration of representations of the animals applied to the Irish from the 19th century through the recent economic crisis.
Lecture at the Galway International Arts Festival's 2015 First Thought series at Kylemore Abbey. This intimate event features a series of talks, discussions, ideas and debate culminating in a live performance by Julie Feeney in the... more
Lecture at the Galway International Arts Festival's 2015 First Thought series at Kylemore Abbey. This intimate event features a series of talks, discussions, ideas and debate culminating in a live performance by Julie Feeney in the ambient surroundings of Kylemore Abbey’s Gothic Church. The total audience capacity for this day-long bespoke programme includes just 80 places.
Festival Artistic Director Paul Fahy commented, "First Thought @Kylemore offers audiences an opportunity to share the unique thoughts of our guest artists and speakers in one of the most beautiful settings in Ireland. As we celebrate and examine the beauty of the skies above us and the landscape around us I think we have a very special day in store which will live long in the memory." Festival CEO John Crumlish added, “It has been ambition of ours to take the First Thought programme on tour with a view to stimulating debate and providing a different kind of experience for our audiences. As Galway prepares to submit its bid for European Capital of Culture 2020, we thought it was an ideal time to do this and we are very excited to present this now in one of our favourite places in the country.”
Festival Artistic Director Paul Fahy commented, "First Thought @Kylemore offers audiences an opportunity to share the unique thoughts of our guest artists and speakers in one of the most beautiful settings in Ireland. As we celebrate and examine the beauty of the skies above us and the landscape around us I think we have a very special day in store which will live long in the memory." Festival CEO John Crumlish added, “It has been ambition of ours to take the First Thought programme on tour with a view to stimulating debate and providing a different kind of experience for our audiences. As Galway prepares to submit its bid for European Capital of Culture 2020, we thought it was an ideal time to do this and we are very excited to present this now in one of our favourite places in the country.”
Lecture on Irish gentrification, hosted by Notre Dame's Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies. Keough-Naughton Fellow Sarah L. Townsend delivers a lecture, “Miracles of Development: from Irish Pigs to Celtic Tigers" at 3:30 PM... more
Lecture on Irish gentrification, hosted by Notre Dame's Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies. Keough-Naughton Fellow Sarah L. Townsend delivers a lecture, “Miracles of Development: from Irish Pigs to Celtic Tigers" at 3:30 PM Friday, January 30, 2015 in 424 Flanner Hall. The lecture examines Patrick McCabe’s 1992 novel The Butcher Boy and Enda Walsh’s 1996 play Disco Pigs, arguing that the literary works deploy and upturn pig stereotypes in order to critique late twentieth-century Irish gentrification. Through their protagonists’ pig-themed defiance and ultimate violence, which borrow elements from the American counterculture, McCabe and Walsh demonstrate the long effects of porcine Irish stereotypes that emerged in colonial racial discourses and reappear in contemporary discussions about European debt. The two works challenge both the aspirational consumerism of a bourgeois Ireland that would prefer to forget its rural and colonial past and the capriciousness of a global capitalist culture that alternatingly rewards and punishes excessive consumption.
This article examines the racial politics of Avoca Handweavers, a family-owned Irish woven textiles purveyor that transformed into a successful lifestyle company over the past quarter century, and which was acquired by the notorious... more
This article examines the racial politics of Avoca Handweavers, a family-owned Irish woven textiles purveyor that transformed into a successful lifestyle company over the past quarter century, and which was acquired by the notorious US-based multinational Aramark in 2015. The anodyne world of Avoca, I argue, helps to reinforce the racialized systems of incarceration and detention from which Aramark profits through its contracts with prisons and immigrant detention facilities in the US and with the direct provision system in Ireland. I focus in particular on the white neoliberal branding disseminated through Avoca’s web and social media presence, showing how its emphasis on luxurious consumption, family values, and self-care occlude (and in some ways, ideologically sanction) the scenes of institutional neglect that characterize many of its parent corporation’s business contracts. Moreover, I examine Aramark’s role in naturalizing what Ronit Lentin calls “Irishness as white supremacy” through the seemingly benign act of aspirational consumerism.
In the late 1980s, amid immigration reform in the United States, legislators and lobbyists secured generous visa allotments for Irish immigrants, whose path to legal residency in the United States narrowed after the 1965 Hart-Celler Act... more
In the late 1980s, amid immigration reform in the United States, legislators and lobbyists secured generous visa allotments for Irish immigrants, whose path to legal residency in the United States narrowed after the 1965 Hart-Celler Act abolished the national origins quota system. Claiming that the new law discriminated against Europeans, Irish advocates framed their campaign as an effort to diversify the post-1965 immigrant pool, which was predominantly Asian and Latin American. By examining the rhetoric deployed in congressional hearings and media appearances, this article considers how groups like the Irish negotiated the terms of their whiteness in the post–civil rights era. It also addresses the global dimensions of this case study, including Irish lobbyists’ coalition with other (nonwhite) immigrant groups, concurrent immigration reform in Australia and Canada, the effect of the Northern Irish civil war and US-Irish diplomatic relations, and its legacies in a newly multicultural contemporary Ireland.
In 2012 and 2013, two productions of the Hijabi Monologues, an American theatre project featuring the stories of Muslim women, were staged in Ireland. This essay considers their relationship to state-sponsored and community-led... more
In 2012 and 2013, two productions of the Hijabi Monologues, an American theatre project featuring the stories of Muslim women, were staged in Ireland. This essay considers their relationship to state-sponsored and community-led interculturalism during the Celtic Tiger and post-Tiger years. Both productions centred on the act of storytelling and tended to downplay xenophobia, instead enacting the type of feel-good intercultural exchange that has dominated Irish and European integration efforts since the late 1990s. At the same time, the 2013 production, on which the essay focuses, employed coalition-building strategies borrowed from the field of migrant activism, thereby ensuring Muslim involvement throughout the production process. The Hijabi Monologues Ireland furnishes a snapshot of a transitional moment in Irish intercultural programming when the state-funded projects of the Celtic Tiger era were giving way to migrant-led initiatives. By examining the production's artistic process, community participation, and funding streams, the essay assesses its successes and shortcomings in addressing the complex challenges of Muslim integration.
Although the term “New Irish” came to designate immigrants to Ireland during the Celtic Tiger, it derives from an older vocabulary developed in the US during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries to describe Irish immigrants’... more
Although the term “New Irish” came to designate immigrants to Ireland during the Celtic Tiger, it derives from an older vocabulary developed in the US during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries to describe Irish immigrants’ changing position within the American racial landscape. As the inhabitants of traditionally Irish enclaves like the neighborhood of Corktown in Detroit, Michigan, began to disperse in the mid-twentieth century, the Black and immigrant residents who replaced them were celebrated as the “new Irish.” This chapter examines the interlinked histories of race, urban renewal, and Irish-American upward mobility in Detroit in order to reevaluate contemporary Irish multiculturalism.
In Irish literary modernism, the symbolic and ideological romance of soil tends to eclipse the pragmatics of property ownership. The dramatic conflict between these two modes of habitation derives from a longstanding tension within the... more
In Irish literary modernism, the symbolic and ideological romance of soil tends to eclipse the pragmatics of property ownership. The dramatic conflict between these two modes of habitation derives from a longstanding tension within the Irish terrestrial imagination. Historically, land has been depicted in Irish writing and political rhetoric either as soil (which conveys its symbolic and social aspects) or as property (which describes its material and legal dimensions). Cultural nationalists of the nineteenth century tended to embrace the former as a rallying cry, drawing on soil’s organic and natal associations to conceptualize the nation-in-waiting, while land reformers insisted on the priority of the latter, thereby transforming the scope and scale of native property ownership. Ultimately, it was soil that became a dominant trope within Irish literary modernism.
Property does not disappear from the literary record, however. This chapter excavates a neglected strand of rural drama, stretching from the early twentieth century to the post-WWII period, that endeavors to reconcile terrestrial sentiment to the acquisition and defense of Irish property. The protagonists of these plays defend their unblinkered and pragmatic pursuit of land ownership as compatible with, rather than anathema to, their contemporaries’ patriotic allegiances to the soil. Against the orthodoxies of cultural nationalism, these works posit material security – as well as spiritual inheritance – as a foundation for a vital and durable future. Restoring rural drama to the corpus of Irish modernism also enriches our understanding of the movement’s geographic and aesthetic breadth.
Property does not disappear from the literary record, however. This chapter excavates a neglected strand of rural drama, stretching from the early twentieth century to the post-WWII period, that endeavors to reconcile terrestrial sentiment to the acquisition and defense of Irish property. The protagonists of these plays defend their unblinkered and pragmatic pursuit of land ownership as compatible with, rather than anathema to, their contemporaries’ patriotic allegiances to the soil. Against the orthodoxies of cultural nationalism, these works posit material security – as well as spiritual inheritance – as a foundation for a vital and durable future. Restoring rural drama to the corpus of Irish modernism also enriches our understanding of the movement’s geographic and aesthetic breadth.
Discussions about the state of Irish fiction during and after the Celtic Tiger often centered on the issue of cliché, as detractors criticized writers for rehearsing timeworn tropes instead of addressing the vertiginous upheavals of the... more
Discussions about the state of Irish fiction during and after the Celtic Tiger often centered on the issue of cliché, as detractors criticized writers for rehearsing timeworn tropes instead of addressing the vertiginous upheavals of the boom and bust. This chapter considers the gendered and generic underpinnings of that claim. More than an aesthetic pitfall, cliché serves as a constitutive feature of post-Celtic Tiger women’s fiction. In Anne Enright’s The Forgotten Waltz (2011) and Tana French’s Broken Harbor (2012), narrators draw upon conventions derived from postwar genre fiction in order to reinforce fraying narratives of bourgeois happiness and success. While cliché provides temporary narrative and affective ballast amid recession, it also enmeshes women novelists within ongoing debates about the value of genre in an evolving literary marketplace.
Despite the renewed interest in the genre of the Bildungsroman generated by postcolonial and minority literature, accounts of its evolution remain centered on the novel. This article seeks to expand the methodological framework for... more
Despite the renewed interest in the genre of the Bildungsroman generated by postcolonial and minority literature, accounts of its evolution remain centered on the novel. This article seeks to expand the methodological framework for analyzing the global circulation of literary genres by tracing lines of influence between the Bildungsroman and dramatic narratives of Bildung. Using modern Irish literature as a case study, the article argues that literatures of the periphery often dispense with traditional guarantors of Bildung unavailable to them, like ample time and freedom of movement, forwarding instead narratives of rapid development that unfold on the stage rather than in novel form. Far from an anomaly, the Irish Bildungsdrama furnishes a formal solution to a model of development incommensurable with the temporal and spatial conditions of the periphery. By tracing the co-constitutive genres of the Irish Bildungsroman and Bildungsdrama, the article also challenges generically sequestered and unidirectional models of world literature, instead regarding the periphery as a site of cross-generic literary innovation.
This article examines the post-imperial migration and racial anxieties that underwrite fantasies of national security in postwar British fiction. Focusing on the autocratic educational institutions featured in Muriel Spark's The Prime of... more
This article examines the post-imperial migration and racial anxieties that underwrite fantasies of national security in postwar British fiction. Focusing on the autocratic educational institutions featured in Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) and Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (2005), the article identifies the school as a fraught ideological site wherein conceptions of national insularity collide with the complex pressures of British globalization. Spark’s Marcia Blaine School and Ishiguro’s Hailsham masquerade as microcosms of a homogeneous British nation only through a rigorous process of racial redaction. By adapting Joseph Slaughter’s concept of the “vanishing point,” the article traces two nonwhite immigrant characters whose brief, silent appearances unsettle the novels’ optics of power, thereby intimating a vast history of racial violence disavowed in the name of bodily, cultural, and political security. Connecting the novels’ vanishing acts to the discursive lacunae perpetuated in the war on terror, the article also considers the imperial residues that continue to shape the contemporary security state.
This article examines the post-imperial migration and racial anxieties that underwrite fantasies of national security in postwar British fiction. Focusing on the autocratic educational institutions featured in Muriel Spark's The Prime of... more
This article examines the post-imperial migration and racial anxieties that underwrite fantasies of national security in postwar British fiction. Focusing on the autocratic educational institutions featured in Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) and Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (2005), the article identifies the school as a fraught ideological site wherein conceptions of national insularity collide with the complex pressures of British globalization. Spark’s Marcia Blaine School and Ishiguro’s Hailsham masquerade as microcosms of a homogeneous British nation only through a rigorous process of racial redaction. By adapting Joseph Slaughter’s concept of the “vanishing point,” the article traces two nonwhite immigrant characters whose brief, silent appearances unsettle the novels’ optics of power, thereby intimating a vast history of racial violence disavowed in the name of bodily, cultural, and political security. Connecting the novels’ vanishing acts to the discursive lacunae perpetuated in the war on terror, the article also considers the imperial residues that continue to shape the contemporary security state.
This assignment demonstrates how Twitter can be used as a creative platform to enhance students’ understanding of experimental literary forms.
This essay examines Patrick McCabe’s 1992 novel The Butcher Boy and Enda Walsh’s 1996 play Disco Pigs, arguing that the literary works deploy and upturn pig stereotypes in order to critique late twentieth-century Irish gentrification.... more
This essay examines Patrick McCabe’s 1992 novel The Butcher Boy and Enda Walsh’s 1996 play Disco Pigs, arguing that the literary works deploy and upturn pig stereotypes in order to critique late twentieth-century Irish gentrification. Through their protagonists’ pig-themed defiance and ultimate violence, which borrow elements from the American counterculture, McCabe and Walsh demonstrate the long effects of porcine Irish stereotypes that emerged in colonial racial discourses and reappear in contemporary discussions about European debt. The two works challenge both the aspirational consumerism of a bourgeois Ireland that would prefer to forget its rural and colonial past and the capriciousness of a global capitalist culture that alternatingly rewards and punishes excessive consumption.
At the end of J.M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, Christy Mahon departs for a cosmopolitan future at the very moment he demands personal and national sovereignty. This article examines why that conflicted gesture has proven so... more
At the end of J.M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, Christy Mahon departs for a cosmopolitan future at the very moment he demands personal and national sovereignty. This article examines why that conflicted gesture has proven so troubling in literary history. Christy’s ambivalent combination of cosmopolitan ambition and nationalist sentiment stoked conflicts within the Celtic Revival, prompting the infamous riots that unfolded during Synge’s 1907 premiere, and it continues to trouble Irish literary criticism. The figure of Christy Mahon challenges what audiences and critics think they know about cosmopolitanism and nationalism, especially as he is updated in recent Playboy adaptations for global stages.