Danny Shanahan

Dr. Danny Shanahan is a visiting postdoctoral fellow working collaboratively between Stanford University and University College Cork, Ireland. He completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2024 and completed an Irish Research Council postdoctoral fellowship at University College Cork in 2025. His first monograph, ‘Literature and Emergency Law in Kashmir and Northern Ireland: Disturbed Areas’ (Forthcoming with Bloomsbury), combines law and literature studies with legal history to reveal the common British colonial roots of modern emergency laws used in the conflicts in Kashmir and Northern Ireland. 

He joined the DAAAS in 2025 through Horizon Europe’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellowship. His time in the department will see him research a second monograph, provisionally entitled 'Waking the Dead: Fiction and the Archival Gap in Ireland, India and the Black Atlantic'. Waking the Dead examines the problem of the archival gap — the impossibility of knowing much of the lives of the historically ‘unimportant’ — and asks how contemporary fiction imagines these lives anew. For decades, cutting-edge scholarship studying colonialism and its aftermath in Ireland, India and the Black Atlantic have worked on the same problem: if archives, the central object of study in mainstream historiography, only contain the written records of the powerful, then how can historians know anything substantial about the lives of the powerless? The study will expand this field of research by investigating contemporary fiction’s dynamic engagement with the archival gap, and what aesthetic, formal and thematic strategies writers employ to imagine individual lives we can know very little about.