Irish Studies Seminar Series, 2021-22: The “Irish Highlands”: Alexander Nimmo, Coastal Environments and Travel in Nineteenth-Century Connemara

The “Irish Highlands”: Alexander Nimmo, Coastal Environments and Travel in Nineteenth-Century Connemara

by Dr Anna Pilz, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow in the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures at the University of Edinburgh (2020-2022) with a 3-month secondment in Irish Studies at the Moore Institute, National University of Ireland, Galway (March-May 2022).

Abstract

Travel texts from the 1820s and 1830s increasingly drew attention to Connemara, with a notable focus on the rich natural “resources” the region offered to contemporary visitors and commentators. Tourists with an appetite for natural curiosities, sporting and/or the “picturesque” were encouraged to explore what became tagged as the “Irish Highlands”. While the texts framed Ireland’s Atlantic coastal environments as an opportunity for improvement and the development of regional industries, colonial infrastructural developments sprang up. This paper takes the Scottish engineer Alexander Nimmo’s work with and along the Atlantic coast as a touchstone to explore the intersecting themes of the development of tourism and regional industry in cultural productions from travel texts to periodical and visual culture.

Biography

Dr Anna Pilz is Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow in the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures at the University of Edinburgh (2020-2022) with a 3-month secondment in Irish Studies at the Moore Institute, National University of Ireland, Galway (March-May 2022). Her research focuses on narratives of environmental change in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cultural productions from and about Ireland, particularly in relation to woodlands and coastscapes. Pilz’s current project Coastal Routes investigates a rich archive of Romantic-era travel writing on Ireland and Scotland’s Atlantic coasts (Grant Agreement No. 890850). Together with Seán Hewitt, she co-edited a Special Issue of Nineteenth-Century Contexts on the theme of ‘Ecologies of the Atlantic Archipelago’ (2021). She previously held research fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh, the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society (LMU, Munich), and an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship at University College Cork.

Respondents

This webinar is part of the Centre for Irish Studies Seminar series.

Registration

Register to attend on Zoom at: https://nuigalway-ie.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_fTFsHjLqTf6JAtasI7MJww