Joseph Patrick Kelly

Joseph Kelly is a professor of literature and the director of Irish and Irish American Studies at the College of Charleston. He has been writing about American democracy for twenty-five years. His latest book, forthcoming from Bloomsbury Publishing, is called "The Biggest Lie: A Hundred Years of American Fascism, 1818-1918." It's the story of those Americans who wanted to establish a herrenvolk nationalist regime--and those who resisted. In 2018, his "Marooned: Jamestown, Shipwreck, and a New History of America's Origin," reinterpreted 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.