Kathryn Conrad

- Professor
Contact Info
Biography —
Whether I am examining literary texts, photography, or surveillance technology, I find myself returning to and reaffirming the basic premise that discourse matters: how we represent the world and how we engage with others discursively has a material effect on the world around us.
A large segment of my work has focused on the changing political landscape in Northern Ireland, especially the relationship between the public sphere and public space. Some of my work, for instance, has shown the ways in which marginalized communities in Northern Ireland reclaim and retool the idea of the ‘public’—both public politics and public spaces—provocatively and productively. In the context of examining Northern Irish political environment, my interest in visual culture and technology drew me to the popular photojournalistic and tourist practice of photographing political wall murals, and I have explored how that political environment is shaped by visual and literary representations of it. My work in Northern Ireland sparked my interest in the politics of surveillance, which in turn brought me to cyberspace to explore the risks posed by the virtual body created by information in the context of surveillance practices and, more generally, to think about the implications of technologies on our ways of knowing and being in the world.
My current monograph project, Technology and the Forms of Irish Modernism, shows how Irish modernist writers respond to the technological and scientific advances of the mid- to late-nineteenth century--and the violence they engendered--by showing how literary forms are more generative, transformative, and beneficial to human flourishing than those offered by technology. The writers examined in this project-- Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats, Tom Greer, Bram Stoker, James Joyce, and Elizabeth Bowen--push back against the rising tide of materialism and physicalism that emerged out of nineteenth-century scientific discourse. Rather than simply rejecting scientific and technological advances, however, these writers show a nuanced understanding of how emerging technologies inform the patterns and forms of our experience, and offer literature as an alternative way to mediate human interaction in an increasingly technologized world.
Research —
Areas of Research
20th-century British, Irish, and Northern Irish literature and culture; visual culture; science, technology, and culture; surveillance studies; fanfiction.
Selected Publications —
Books
Conrad, Kathryn, Cóilín Parsons, and Julie McCormick Weng, eds. Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2019.
Conrad, Kathryn, Locked in the Family Cell: Gender, Sexuality, and Political Agency in Irish National Discourse. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004.
Selected articles and book chapters (see also KU ScholarWorks)
"Infernal Machines: Weapons, Media, and the Networked Modernism of Tom Greer and James Joyce." In Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism. Vol. ed. Kathryn Conrad, Cóilín Parsons, and Julie McCormick Weng. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2019.
"Consuming Identity: ILGO, St. Patrick's Day, and the Transformation of Urban Public Space." Consuming St. Patrick's Day. Ed. Jonathan Skinner and Dominic Bryan. Cambridge, England: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2015.
"What the Digital Humanities Can't Do," The Chronicle Review (The Chronicle of Higher Education), 8 Sept 2014.
"'You Won't Re-route this Fruit': Northern Ireland, Queer, and a Geopolitics of Affection," Irish University Review 43 (2013): 30-35.
"Lighted Squares: Framing 'Araby.'" With Mark Osteen. Collaborative Dubliners, ed. Vicki Mahaffey. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2012.
"Nothing to Hide…Nothing to Fear": Discriminatory Surveillance and Queer Visibility in Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The Ashgate Research Companion to Queer Theory, ed. Noreen Giffney and Michael O'Rourke. Surrey: Ashgate, 2009.
"Surveillance, Gender, and the Virtual Body in the Information Age," Surveillance and Society 6.4 (2009): 380-7.
Awards & Honors —
Hall Center for the Humanities Research Fellowship, U. of Kansas, Spring 2016.
Byron T. Shutz Award for Excellence in Teaching, U. of Kansas, 2007.
Keeler Intra-University Fellowship, with Political Science, U. of Kansas, Spring 2005.
Conger-Gabel Teaching Professorship, Dept. of English, U. of Kansas, 2004-7. Kansas