DrAilise Bulfin

Dr Ailise Bulfin is a literary and cultural scholar whose research and teaching interests range across popular culture from the nineteenth century to the contemporary period. Her work explores the dark side of the human imagination, with a particular focus on representations of war, environmental catastrophe and child sexual abuse. She is interested in how these representations engage with and help to shape public understandings of the issues represented.

She is currently PI of the 2021 European Research Council Starting Grant project ‘Investigating Fictional Representations of Child Sexual Abuse in Contemporary Culture: Myths and Understanding (CSAReps)’. The project examines how the critical issue of child sexual abuse (CSA) is represented in fictional works, such as novels, films, television series, across a range of key contemporary genres (e.g. crime, horror and young adult), and investigates the ways in which these works affect their audiences. The project involves interdisciplinary research drawing on techniques from literary criticism, medical humanities, and cognitive and empirical literary and cultural studies. It also entails close collaborations with CSA survivors, support professionals who work with survivors and academics across a range of relevant disciplines internationally.

She has published a number of critical essays on topics such as sexual violence, xenophobia, invasion scares, natural catastrophe and climate change. Her monograph, Gothic Invasions: Imperialism, War and Fin-de-Siècle Popular Fiction, was published in 2018 and explores the interchange between popular literature and socio-political anxieties about war and invasion in the period before the First World War. She is co-organiser of the Invasion Network international research group and has worked with its members to produce a double special issue of Critical Survey considering the impact of the work of the major invasion fiction author and conspiracist William Le Queux on early-twentieth century fears of war, invasion, spying and sabotage (2020).

She previously held an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship at Trinity College Dublin from 2014-16 and lectured in English at Maynooth University in 2017. Her work has also been funded by the Irish Research Council, Royal Irish Academy, Enterprise Ireland and the Wellcome Trust; and in collaborative projects by the British Academy and the Spanish Government Programme for Research into Social Challenges.