Do 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 is a series looking at the intersection between art, psychology, folklore, architecture, natural history and Ireland’s urban gothic writing.

Vampires, ghosts, and the undead have an enduring cultural legacy. These uncanny figures inform, or perhaps infect, depictions of the body, maternity, and sexuality in contemporary Irish women’s writing. This panel discussion, recorded live in MoLI’s Old Physics Theatre, led by Dr Katie Mishler and featuring Sarah Davis-Goff, Doireann Ní Ghríofa, and Sophie White, uncovers how the gothic monstrosities of Bram Stoker and others continue to be a powerful metaphor for social anxieties, marginalisation, and historical erasure.

Sarah Davis-Goff is co-founder of Tramp Press, which publishes the Recovered Voices series, re-publishing a lost Irish classic once a year, with a bent towards speculative fiction. In 2019 her own novel Last Ones Left Alive was published in the UK and Ireland by Tinder Press, and in the US by Flatiron. Last Ones Left Alive was nominated for the Edinburgh First Book Prize and the Not-The-Booker Prize, shortlisted for an Irish Book Award and the Kate O’Brien Award, and won the Chrysalis Award. She lives in Dublin.

Doireann Ní Ghríofa is a poet and essayist. Her prose début A Ghost in the Throat was awarded the James Tait Back Prize for Biography, and described as “powerful” (New York Times), and “captivatingly original” (The Guardian). Doireann is also author of six critically-acclaimed books of poetry, each a deepening exploration of birth, death, desire, and domesticity.

Sophie White is a writer and podcaster from Dublin. Her first book, a memoir-cookbook work, Recipes for a Nervous Breakdown (Gill 2016) was shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards. Her second book and first novel, the bestselling, Filter This (Hachette, 2019) was also shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards. Her third book, Unfiltered (Hachette, 2020) was described by Marian Keyes as ‘such fun – gas, clever stuff’. Her fourth book and second work of non-fiction is the bestselling essay collection, Corpsing: My Body and Other Horror Shows published by Tramp Press in 2021.

Dr Katie Mishler is an Irish Research Council Enterprise Partnership Postdoctoral Fellow (2020-2022) in collaboration with the UCD Centre for Cultural Analytics and Museum of Literature Ireland (MoLI). Her current project, Mapping Gothic Dublin: 1820-1900, researches the relationship between Dublin’s urban history and the development of Ireland’s literary gothic tradition.

The research for this podcast is supported by Dr Mishler’s postdoctoral project Mapping Gothic Dublin: 1820-1900, funded by an Irish Research Council Enterprise Partnership Fellowship.

Producers Ian Dunphy & Benedict Schlepper-Connolly
Sound Ian Dunphy
Music CAPE