Katie Donnelly

PhD Candidate

Katie Donnelly is an IRC-funded doctoral student in the UCD School of English, Drama and Film under the supervision of Dr Sarah Comyn. Her thesis, ‘Mining Childhood: Labour Regimes and Gold Mining in Nineteenth-Century Colonial Children’s Literature’, examines representations of gold-mining labour in the nineteenth-century periodical press of Australia and New Zealand, particularly focussing on the emergence of colonial children’s literature that depicts extractive labour. Falling under WP 3 – Mineral Regimes, Katie’s thesis analyses children’s newspaper fiction as a space of gendered colonisation, where white masculinity is glorified in terms of gold and land acquisition, while women are celebrated as colonial homemakers in settler mining communities.