When Academics turn Trade: Research and Creative Non-Fiction Publishing

Recorded December 5th, 2024. Rooney Writer Fellow Mark O’Connell (A
Thread of Violence, 2023) in conversation with historian Maurice
Casey (Hotel Lux, 2024) about writing across the
academic/commercial publishing boundary. Mark O’Connell is the
author of A Thread of Violence, Notes from an Apocalypse, and To Be
a Machine, which was awarded the 2018 Wellcome Book Prize, the 2019
Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, and was shortlisted for the
Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction. He is a regular contributor
to The New York Review of Books. His work has appeared in The New
Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Slate, and The Guardian. He
lives in Dublin with his family. Dr Maurice J. Casey is a Research
Fellow in Queen’s University Belfast, where he is a postdoc on a
project exploring histories of queer sexuality in Northern Ireland.
An expert on the history of international communism, he studied
English and History at TCD before completing his MPhil at Cambridge
and his DPhil in Oxford. He also held a Fulbright scholarship at
Stanford and was the Historian in Residence at the Irish Department
of Foreign Affairs and EPIC, the Irish Emigration Museum. His first
book Hotel Lux: An Intimate History of Communism’s Forgotten
Radicals, which was based on his PhD thesis, was published by
Footnote Press in August 2024. Learn more at
www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub