Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies

Staff Profile

Dr Fionnghuala Sweeney

Reader in American and Black Atlantic Literatures

Background

Fionnghuala Sweeney specializes in American and Black Atlantic literature and cultures. Her research encompasses African American literature and visual arts; afromodernism; anti-colonial radicalism; Slavery Studies; black book history; eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth-century US literary studies; race and performance; Anglophone and Hispanophone Caribbean writing; Irish writing, slavery and empire; transatlantic studies, especially of fugitive and former slaves in Ireland and Britain; life writing; and art history and visual culture. She welcomes PhD projects in any of these areas.


Research Roles:

Co-Editor of Irish Journal of American Studies

Member of the organizing committee of the Irish Association of American Studies

Director of the AHRC Northern Bridge Consortium; Newcastle Director of Northern Bridge (to end Jan 2020)

Steering Committee of the Centre for Latin American Research

Editorial Board, Journal of American Studies

Advisory Board, Feminist Theory

Member of the AHRC Peer Review College (2008-2014)

Editorial Board, FORECAAST series in African American Studies, Liverpool University Press




Research




Teaching

Current teaching:

Level 1 Introduction to Literary Studies: African American Poetry 

Level 2 SELL 2205: Fictions of Migration 

Level 3 Special Subject SEL 3378: Landscapes of American Modernism

Level 3 SEL 3362: BA Dissertation in English Literature

MA SEL 8357: Radicalisms - Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Slavery

MA SEL 8417: MA Dissertation





Publications