Maria McGarrity
Maria McGarrity completed her undergraduate work at Rutgers University. She earned an MA in English from the University of New Orleans and her PhD in English from the University of Miami. She sits on the Editorial Board of the Caribbean Journal, Anthurium and has previously served as Managing Editor of the James Joyce Literary Supplement. Her interests include Modern British, Irish, Caribbean, and Postcolonial Literatures and Theory; Twentieth-Century and Transatlantic Studies.
Her work in British, Irish, and Caribbean literatures and cultures grows out of a desire to examine the intersections between literary modernism and the global impact of colonialism. She is particularly interested in the demise of the British Empire and the role of geography in creating an “island imaginary” for writers. For example, EA Markham’s Letters from Ulster and the Hugo Poems joins the “Troubles” of Northern Ireland with the aftermath of Hurricane Hugo in the Caribbean and highlights the imperfect and yet enduring relation among these cultures. The complex interplay of cultures that makes up both Ireland and the Caribbean, the islands they inhabit both literally and metaphorically, ensures that neither peoples nor cultures exist in anything less than a “meta-archipelago.” The links in these chains of islands and peoples, dispersed geographically, economically, and politically connect strongly not simply throughout the North Atlantic but throughout the larger diasporic world.
Current Appointments
Assistant Professor of English, Long Island University, Brooklyn, New York
Associate Member, Seminar in Irish Studies, Columbia University, New York
Editorial Board, Anthurium: a Journal of Caribbean Literary Studies
“Mary Seacole’s Wonderful Adventures: an Eastward Economy of Disease,”
Victorian Institutes Journal. (Forthcoming, 28 pages).
“The Gulf Stream and the Epic Drives of Joyce and Walcott.” Ariel:
a Review of International English Literature. 34 (2003): 1-22.
“Impossible Sanctuary: Geography, Sexual Transgression, and
Flight in Big House and Plantation Novels.” Journal of West Indian
Literature. 11 (2003): 29-57.
Useful Links:
http://scholar.library.miami.edu/anthurium/home.htm
www.english.ucalgary.ca/ariel/ariel.htm
http://www.cavehill.uwi.edu/fhe/hum/publications/JournalsJWIL.htm