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Eamon Cleary Chair in Irish StudiesMaebh Long profile image

Contact details

Tel: +64 3 556 5290
Email: maebh.long@otago.ac.nz
Office 103, First Floor
99 Albany Street
Dunedin

Mail:
Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies
University of Otago
PO Box 56
Dunedin 9054
New Zealand

Maebh Long is the Eamon Cleary Chair of Irish Studies and Co-Director of the Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies. She holds degrees from University College Cork and Durham University. Her research interests include Irish literature, particularly the work of Flann O’Brien, Pacific modernism and the medical humanities. Her first monograph, Assembling Flann O’Brien (2014), won the Flann O’Brien Society award for best book-length work, as did her edited collection of O’Brien’s correspondence, The Collected Letters of Flann O’Brien (2018). She is now president of the Flann O’Brien Society, co-editor of the Journal of Flann O’Brien Studies and president of the Irish Studies Association of Australia and New Zealand.

Professor Long’s research on Pacific literature, which draws on her years in Fiji with the University of the South Pacific, includes the co-edited collection New Oceania: Modernisms and Modernities in the Pacific (2019) and the co-authored monograph The Rise of Pacific Literature: Decolonization, Radical Campuses and Modernism (2024), both with Matthew Hayward. These publications, alongside articles, special issues and conferences, stem from the Oceanian Modernisms project she founded with Dr Hayward.

Her work on the medical humanities includes research on medical metaphors and narratives of risk during the Covid-19 pandemic in Aotearoa New Zealand, and ‘Modern Immunity’, a major project on discourses of medical and political immunity in modernist advertising and fiction. The immune poetics she maps out describes the ways modernist cultures responded to anticipated harm by rhetorically evoking ideas of a body, and a body politic, whose resistance spans medical and political threats. Her Modern Immunity project is supported by the Marsden Fund.

Professor Long had held fellowships at New York University, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin and in 2025 was the O’Donnell Fellow in Irish Studies at the University of Melbourne.

Research Supervision

Professor Long welcomes research proposals in the fields of Irish, Pacific and British literature, modernism, and the medical humanities. She particularly welcomes proposals in the following areas: Flann O’Brien; Irish modernism; 20th and 21st century Pacific literature; pandemic fiction; narratives of immunity and immunisation.

Publications

Long, M. (2026, February). The mobile boundaries of the immune self [Plenary panel: Theorising borders]. Plenary presentation at the Crossing Borders Symposium, Dunedin, New Zealand. Conference Contribution - Verbal presentation and other Conference outputs

Long, M. (2025). Immunity for sale: Depictions of immunity in British newspaper advertising, 1890-1940. Medical History, 69(1), 99-118. doi: 10.1017/mdh.2024.26 Journal - Research Article

Long, M. (2025). ‘Invisible cars and the seeds of pestilence’: Bacteriology, ether and the famine in Robert Potter's The germ growers [O'Donnell Fellowship Essay]. Australasian Journal of Irish Studies, 25, 57-74. Journal - Research Article

Long, M., & Hayward, M. (2025, May-June). English no more: The rise of Pacific literature. Verbal presentation at the Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), [online]. Conference Contribution - Verbal presentation and other Conference outputs

Long, M. (2025, November). ‘She was still immune, ignorant’: Elizabeth Bowen and narratives of immunity. Verbal presentation at the 27th Irish Studies Association of Australia and New Zealand (ISAANZ) Conference: Health, Wellness and Care, Dunedin, New Zealand. Conference Contribution - Verbal presentation and other Conference outputs

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