Fulbright Distinguished Scholar of Anglophone Irish Writing, Seamus Heaney Centre and School of English at Queen’s University Belfast

Margot Backus completed her second book, Scandal Work: James Joyce, the New Journalism, and the Home Rule Newspaper Wars (University of Notre Dame Press) in 2013. Her prizewinning book, The Gothic Family Romance: Heterosexuality and Child Sacrifice in the Anglo-Irish Colonial Order, came out from Duke University Press in 1999.

With Joseph Valente, she recently completed work on The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature: Writing the Unspeakable (Forthcoming, Indiana University Press, Fall 2020).

This study examines literary engagements with a series of twentieth-century sex scandals that serially transformed Ireland’s moral and political landscape, considering the complex significance of juvenile narrators in the most influential of these engagements.