Prof. O’Malley’s The Irish and the Imagination of Race Wins Honorable Mention for the North American Victorian Studies Association’s Best Book Prize

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Professor Patrick O’Malley’s most recent publication, The Irish and the Imagination of Race, was named as the North American Victorian Studies Association’s Honorable Mention for their Best Book Prize! Check out the write-up here:

Patrick R. O’Malley, The Irish and the Imagination of Race: White Supremacy across the Atlantic in the Nineteenth Century (U of Virginia P, 2023)

Book cover with title and image of nineteenth-century men fighting in front of woman in a green dress standing on a table

How does imagination of race manifest in genres of writing? What body of evidence could help answer such a question, and what methods would be adequate to apprehend it? Weaving the development of race science together with Victorian studies’ continuing failure to confront the inextricability of white supremacy with genre, Patrick O’Malley’s deeply researched account begins to show how several emblematic genres shaped the contours of Irish whiteness. Even more importantly, its head-spinning juxtapositions demonstrate how concretely the stories we tell about race are linked to the stories we tell about genre. The gothic, the bardic epic, the stage melodrama, the political polemic, the sentimental novel, and the national tale become exemplary in this transatlantic study that takes seriously the ways that ideas of race and genre were transmitted, circulated, and became normative.

Congratulations, Professor O’Malley!

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