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Patricia Palmer works on the literature of colonial encounter, particularly on the troubled borderland between language and colonisation, and between writing and violence.  Her first book, Language and Conquest in Early Modern Ireland: English Renaissance Texts and English Imperial Expansion (Cambridge University Press, 2001), explores the relationship between Elizabethan high culture and the conduct of colonisation – particularly linguistic colonisation – in Ireland.  Language and Conquest has a strongly comparative approach, reading English colonial practice in both Ireland and North America against Spanish conduct in the New World.

Her subsequent work has maintained that comparativist inflection. She has challenged the tendency of much postcolonial criticism to privilege colonial and canonical texts at the expense of native voices; her recent work has sought to reinsert those voices into the debate.

She is currently writing Severed Heads, Grafted Tongues: Ireland and the Writing of Violence.  It explores the writing of atrocity, by crossing back and forth between literary severed heads and the very literal beheadings that stake out the landscape of early-modern Ireland.  But as well as being a space of conflict, early-modern Ireland proves to be a remarkably rich space of cultural transmission and the work examines a series of translations conducted under the sign of beheading: Sir John Harington's version of Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, George Carew's translation of Ercilla y Zuñiga’s Araucana and Richard Stanihurst's Aeneid.

Patricia Palmer (2009)  'Losing Our Heads: Beheadings in Literature and Culture' Eighteenth-Century Studies, 43 (1), pp. 137-139.
[Book Review (Print)]

Patricia Palmer (2005) 'Cross-Talk and Mermaid-Speak', in Britain and Ireland: Lives Entwined pp. 47-64
[Chapter]

Patricia Palmer (2003)  'Interpreters and the Politics of Translation and Traduction in Sixteenth-Century Ireland' Irish Historical Studies, 33 (131), pp. 257-277.
[Article in print Journal]

Patricia Palmer (2001) Language and Conquest in Early Modern Ireland:English Renaissance Literature and Elizabethan Imperial Expansion Cambridge University Press 
[Authored Book in print]