Professor Aileen Douglas

Educated in Ireland and America, Aileen Douglas holds a PhD from Princeton University. She began her academic career in the States, teaching at Washington University in St. Louis for five years before returning to Trinity to take up a position in the School of English. Her research interests focus on the writing of the long eighteenth century. In her monographs, 'Work in Hand: Print, Script, and Writing, 1690-1820' (OUP 2017) and 'Uneasy Sensations: Smollett and the Body' (Chicago 1996) she explores aspects of embodiment, materiality, and literary representation. She also has a particular interest in Irish writing and writing by women. Aileen Douglas is a General Editor of the IRC supported Early Irish Fiction 1690-1820 series (Four Courts, 2011-) and has co-edited two volumes for the series. She is a co-organizer of the Swift350 academic conference being held in June 2017 to mark the 350th anniversary of the birth of Jonathan Swift. Elected to Fellowship of Trinity College Dublin in 2000, she served between 2008 and 2011 as Senior Lecturer/Dean of Undergraduate Studies, a statutory officer of the University. Since 2016 she has been Head of the School of English.

  18th Century literature   Irish writing, especially early Irish fiction   Maria Edgeworth   print culture

Aileen Douglas has a number of interrelated research interests. Most recently her concern with issues of materiality, embodiment, and representation has focused on eighteenth-century print culture. Work in Hand: Script, Print, and Writing, 1690-1840 (OUP 2017) argues that between the late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries manual writing was a dynamic technology. It examines script in relation to becoming a writer; in constructions of the author; and in emerging ideas of the human. Research for the book involved consideration of eighteenth-century writing masters, and of pedagogy in the Irish Charter Schools and in the monitorial system devised by Andrew Bell in India. Literary figures discussed include Samuel Johnson, William Blake, and Isaac D'Israeli. Conceptually, this research is connected to earlier work on it-narrators, and on the body in eighteenth-century writing, especially in the fiction of the Scottish novelist Tobias Smollett. She has a general interest in disciplinary and canon formation, particularly in relation to Irish writing, and has published a range of articles and book chapters on Jonathan Swift and Maria Edgeworth. She contributed a chapter on 'The Novel before 1800' to the 'Cambridge Companion to the Irish novel' (2006) and her exploration of Irish fiction in the long eighteenth century continues in her work for the 'Early Irish Fiction Series' (Four Courts Press, ongoing). In this regard, she has become very interested in making available and popularizing the work of Elizabeth Sheridan, whose novel The Triumph of Prudence over Passion she has co-edited. At the moment she is working on an edition of Sheridan's Emeline (1782). Her developing research project brings together print culture and a long-standing concern with gender. It is especially interested in how writing for, or about, children enabled eighteenth and early-nineteenth century women to become published authors. A forthcoming book chapter on the poet Mary Barber for 'Irish Literature in Transition (Cambridge, 2018) deals with these issues, as does a forthcoming book chapter on Maria Edgeworth's representation of the child's awareness of time (Palgrave, 2017).