Associate Professor

British and Irish Literary Studies

Research Area(s)

Irish Studies; British and World Literature; Genre (fiction, drama)

Contact Information

Email: sltownse@unm.edu
Office Location: PAIS 1223

Biography

Sarah L. Townsend (Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley; B.A. University of Michigan) is a scholar of Irish literature and culture and co-founder of the Irish Studies Program at UNM. The adopted Korean granddaughter of Irish-American immigrants, her current research and teaching centers on the transnational formation of Irish identity. Townsend is the author of Irish Drama and Coming of Age in the Periphery (forthcoming from Edinburgh UP), co-editor of The Irish Bildungsroman (Syracuse UP, 2025), and has published over a dozen articles and chapters on topics like Irish women’s genre fiction, community theatre in Ireland, Black and Irish Traveller hair cultures, ethnic U.S. neighborhoods, Irish lifestyle marketing and the Direct Provision system, and Irish-American immigration history. Her latest research project, What’s New about the New Irish? Immigration, Whiteness, and Racial Mobility in Ireland and the United States, 1892-2020, reevaluates contemporary Irish multiculturalism by tracing its surprising origins in 19th and 20th-century Irish-American racial climbing. Drawing on extensive archival research in Ireland and North America, the project shows how the present-day celebration of so-called “new Irish” immigrants in Ireland paradoxically derives from an older vocabulary developed in the United States to support Irish immigrants—who were assigned a qualified variety of whiteness upon arrival—in securing a firm place in the white majority.

Townsend has held major residential fellowships at Wellesley College’s Newhouse Center for the Humanities (2019-20) and the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at Notre Dame (2014-15). She has delivered invited lectures at the Galway International Arts Festival, the Irish Consulate, NUI Galway, Villanova, Notre Dame, Boston College, Dartmouth, Brandeis, and the 2020 American Conference for Irish Studies, where she gave the keynote address. She is Vice President of the American Conference for Irish Studies (ACIS), Past President of ACIS-West, and served on the MLA Irish Forum from 2020-25. At UNM, Townsend teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on Irish Studies; British, and world literature; theories of transnationalism and globalization; and graduate professionalization. She supervises M.A. and Ph.D. students, organizes Irish Studies events programming, and serves on the Academic Freedom and Tenure Committee and the Graduate Studies Council. She is currently serving as the Faculty Fellow for Strategic Recruitment in UNM’s Office of Graduate Studies.

Professor Townsend is currently accepting new Ph.D. students with a focus on modern and contemporary Irish literature and culture.