Prof Patricia Palmer

Biography

Patricia Palmer came to the University of Maynooth via King’s College London and the Universities of York and Oxford. Her work almost always finds itself positioned at the intersection of culture and conflict, in the troubled regions where violence and the aesthetic meet. Her first book, Language and Conquest in Early Modern Ireland: English Renaissance Literature and Elizabethan Imperial Expansion, is a study of linguistic imperialism. It traces both the originary moment of the language shift from Irish to English which has been so formative for Irish writing up to the present and the origins of English linguistic nationalism itself -- and the relationship between English Renaissance literature and imperial expansion. Her second book, The Severed Head and the Grafted Tongue, explores how the violence of the Elizabethan conquest bleeds into literature in English, Irish, Latin and Spanish. It is, among other things, a study of colonial brutality, of the real-world context of epic-romance, and of the politics of translation.

Research Interest

Arts