Katie Donnelly
- School: School of English, Drama and Film
- Supervisor: Dr Sarah Comyn
Colonial Childhood: Labour Regimes and Goldmining in Nineteenth-Century Colonial Children’s Literature
My doctoral project explores representations of goldmining labour in the nineteenth-century periodical press of Australia and New Zealand, particularly focussing on the emergence of colonial children’s literature that depicts extractive labour. Traditionally viewed as masculine environments, my thesis aims to revise gendered and racialised understandings of these extractive regions through a focus on periodical literature written for children. My project examines how colonial labour structures are presented to a young readership, while considering how the figure of the heroic masculine miner is domesticated or queered, how women’s labour contributed to the domestication of the extractivist landscape, and how the figure of the convict might be redeemed through labour on the goldfields.
My PhD is part of the IRC-funded project, ‘Imperial Minerals: Reading Mineral Extraction in the Anglophone Literary Cultures of the British Southern Settler Colonies, 1842-1910, headed by Dr Sarah Comyn.
I hold a BA joint honours degree in English Literature and German (2018-2021), during which I was awarded the Patrick Semple Medal in English and second prize in the NUI Dr H H Stewart Literary Scholarship. I completed my MA degree in Literature and Culture at University College Dublin in 2021-2022.
Email: (opens in a new window)katie.donnelly1@ucdconnect.ie
Minerals website: (opens in a new window)imperialminerals.ie
Colonial Children’s Fiction website: (opens in a new window)https://colonialfiction.wordpress.com