People

This project is co-led by Dr Sarah Comyn and Dr Megan Kuster.

Dr Comyn is an Assistant Professor and Ad Astra Fellow in the UCD School of English, Drama and Film. Her work explores the relationship between literature and value; where value is considered as aesthetic, economic, social, ethical and/or political. She was previously an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow (2018-20), and a European Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow (2016-18) on the SouthHem Project led by Professor Porscha Fermanis.

Recent publications include: Political Economy (Routledge, 2024); Worlding the South: Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture and the Southern Settler Colonies (Manchester, 2021; ed. with Porscha Fermanis), Early Public Libraries and Colonial Citizenship in the British Southern Hemisphere (2019: with Lars Atkin, Porscha Fermanis and Nathan Garvey); and Political Economy and the Novel: A Literary History of “Homo Economicus” (Palgrave 2018). She is the author of articles on the literary cultures of gold mining, settler sociability, race, and hemispheric methods in the Journal of Victorian Culture, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, Journal of Commonwealth Literature.

You can email Dr Comyn at sarah.comyn[at]ucd.ie

Dr Kuster is Postdoctoral Research Assistant at the University of Manchester on the “Avian Poetics” project, led by Dr Clara Dawson, and an affiliated researcher at the UCD Humanities Institute. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century colonial science and literature, especially issues of race, labour, and capital. She was previously a European Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow (2019-21) on the SouthHem Project led by Professor Porscha Fermanis. She has published articles on Katherine Mansfield, and natural history collecting in nineteenth-century New Zealand in Tinakori: Critical Journal of the Katherine Mansfield Society and the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History.

You can email Dr Kuster at megan.kuster[at]manchester.ac.uk

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