Staff profile

I work on Irish literature and culture from the late eighteenth century through to the Irish Revival. My first book focused on improvement: Ireland and the Fiction of Improvement (OUP).

I am currently completing a second book on consumption and diet in the period from c.1780 through to the Revival. This project has been funded by the AHRC.

Recent publications have focused on animals and nature in nineteenth-century Ireland. An essay on the cultural nationalism of D. P. Moran and Douglas Hyde is forthcoming in 2025.

Authored book

• O'Connell, H. (2006). Ireland and the Fiction of Improvement. Oxford University Press

Chapter in book

• O'Connell, H. Revival Cheerlessness: The Cultural Nationalism of Douglas Hyde and D.P. Moran. . Cambridge University Press
• O'Connell, H. (2019). The Nature of Improvement. In M. (. Kelly (Ed.), Nature and the Environment in Ireland in the Nineteenth Century. Liverpool University Press
• O'Connell, H. (2013). Food Values: Joyce and Dietary Revival in Ireland. In J. Nash (Ed.), James Joyce in the Nineteenth Century (128-148). Cambridge University Press
• O'Connell, H. (2010). Reconciliation and Emancipation: The Banims and Carleton. In J. Wright (Ed.), Blackwell Companion to Irish Writing (411-426). Blackwell
• O'Connell, H. (2005). The Fiction of Improvement. In J. B. (ed) (Ed.), The Irish Novel in the Nineteenth Century. Dublin: Four Courts Press

Journal Article

• O'Connell, H. (online). Improved English and the Silence of Irish. Canadian journal of Irish studies, 13-20
• O'Connell, H. (2018). Bleak Food: William Wilde, Famine and Gastronomy. Canadian journal of Irish studies, 41, 156-178. https://doi.org/10.2307/26435226
• O'Connell, H. (2015). Animal welfare in Post-Union Ireland. New hibernia review, 19(1), 34-52. https://doi.org/10.1353/nhr.2015.0004
• O'Connell, H. (2013). “At Our Potatoes”: Recipes for Normality in Post-Union Ireland. Éire-Ireland, 48(3&4), 49-78. https://doi.org/10.1353/eir.2013.0027
• O'Connell, H. (2012). "A Raking Pot of Tea": Consumption and Excess in Early Nineteenth-Century Ireland. Literature and History, 21(2), 32-47. https://doi.org/10.7227/lh.21.2.3