Dublin Gothic Podcast

Dublin Gothic

o you enjoy reading ghost stories alone at night? Have you ever binged an entire true crime series? Or do you unwind watching horror films like The Exorcist, or reading the supernatural novels of Stephen King? The Dublin Gothic podcast examines the legacy of Ireland’s literary gothic tradition and how the past powerfully shapes our present. Episodes examine sixteenth-century sexology, Ireland’s history of dark tourism, the ghostly legacy of Gerard Manley Hopkins, the thrills of experiencing fear, and more.

This podcast invites listeners and guests to consider: What secret histories lie beneath the city streets we walk? What buried stories haunt our museums, our institutions, and our libraries? How do haunted histories intersect with artistic constructions of terror, horror, and the body? And perhaps most pressingly, how does the nineteenth-century gothic inform contemporary writing?

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The Psychology of Horror

At the height of COVID, an unprecedented global health crisis, there is irony in the fact that, as a culture, we remain fascinated by stories of the macabre. In this episode, psychoanalyst and cultural critic Dr Noreen Giffney and editor Brian J. Showers of Swan River Press join Dr Katie Mishler remotely to discuss the lasting impact of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s writing, why we find comfort in fear, and if we experience horror as an emotion.

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Charles Maturin in Marsh's Library

What do dancing curates, and headless mummies, and dog-eared sixteenth-century manuscripts about sexual deviancy have in common? In this episode, Dr Katie Mishler speaks with Dr Tina Morin, senior lecturer in English at University of Limerick, and Dr Jason McElligott, Director of Marsh’s Library in Dublin, about Charles Maturin’s gothic masterpiece Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) and Marsh’s Library’s new exhibition, Ragged, livid & on fire: The Wanderings of Melmoth at 200. The panel discuss Maturin’s visits to Marsh’s Library, imagine what he may have read there and shed light on some bizarre finds within the walls of the library.

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Daughters of Dracula

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) presents a rather antagonistic view of women, both celebrating the chaste Mina Harker for her intelligence, and castigating any woman, like Lucy Westerna, who strays from Victorian ideals of femininity. However, is it possible that his work has a feminist legacy? In this episode, recorded in front of a live audience at MoLI’s Old Physics Theatre, Dr Katie Mishler speaks to Sarah Davis-Goff, Doireann Ní Ghríofa, and Sophie White to investigate why contemporary women’s writing embraces gothic monsters like ghosts, vampires, and the undead.

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Writing Histories with Sarah Moss

How did you spend your lockdown? UCD Professor of Creative Writing Sarah Moss moved to another country, learned how to roller skate, and found inspiration for a new novel. In this episode, Dr Katie Mishler sits down with the novelist to discuss her new work The Fell (2021), which follows three characters grappling with isolation at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Moss discusses some of the gothic inspiration behind her other novels, her love for Charlotte Brontë, and why so many of her narrators are historians.

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Seán Hewitt's Gothic Memoir

Writer Seán Hewitt discusses his gothic memoir All Down Darkness Wide with Dr Katie Mishler. The book engages with the ghosts of queer history, including MoLI's own resident poet ghost: Gerard Manley Hopkins, who lived and died in MoLI's home, UCD Newman House, in the late nineteenth century.

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Vona Groarke on Gerard Manley Hopkins

What ghostly traces do poets leave behind, and how do we curate their legacy? Dr Katie Mishler speaks to poet Vona Groake, Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Manchester, about the life and writing of MoLI’s resident ghost, poet and Jesuit Priest Gerard Manly Hopkins. In 1884, Hopkins became Professor of Classics at University College Dublin, and lived and worked in Newman House, now the home of MoLI, until his death of typhoid fever in 1889 at the age of 44. By visiting MoLI’s hidden corridors, including the Hopkins bedroom that Groake curated in the 1990s, the two discuss Hopkins’ enduring contribution to poetry, his difficult life and death in Dublin, and whether or not he haunts the halls of MoLI.