Joseph Patrick Kelly

Joseph Kelly is a professor of literature and the director of Irish and Irish American Studies at the College of Charleston. His latest book, Marooned, reinterprets the Jamestown colony, shifting much of the credit for American democracy away from Plymouth Plantation and onto the rag-tag castaway employees of the Virginia Company. In 2013, he published, America’s Longest Siege: Charleston, Slavery, and the Slow March Towards Civil War, which details the evolving ideology of slavery in America. His first book was a study of the Irish novelist James Joyce, censorship, obscenity, and the Cold War (Our Joyce: From Outcast to Icon). He also edits the popular series, The Seagull Books of Poems, Stories, Plays, and Essays for the publisher W. W. Norton. Right now he’s at work on a book about free speech, fascism, and the invention of liberal democracy.