Is Irish history particularly macabre, or do the Irish have a peculiar fascination with death? In this episode of The Dublin Gothic Podcast, recorded live in front of an audience in MoLI’s Old Physics Theatre as part of First Fridays, Dr Katie Mishler speaks to Dr Gillian O’Brien about her book The Darkness Echoing: Exploring Ireland’s Places of Famine, Death and Rebellion (2020). Dr O’Brien discusses her tour of Ireland’s ‘dark’ history sites, the ethics of dark tourism, and Ireland’s relationship to the dead.

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.

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.

Producer Ian Dunphy
Sound Ian Dunphy
Music CAPE

Ireland’s Dark Tourism