Anna Pilz is an academic developer and trainer at the Institute for Academic Development, where she supports University level postgraduate researchers and research staff in their professional development through high-quality training in such areas as time management, academic writing, mentoring, funding, and writing fellowship applications. She runs in-person writing retreats and regularly contributes to the IAD4Researchers blog. 

Previous to her IAD appointment, Anna was Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow in the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures at the University of Edinburgh (2020-2022) with a 3-month secondment at the Moore Institute, National University of Ireland, Galway (March-May 2022). Her project investigated a rich archive of Romantic-era travel writing on Ireland and Scotland’s Atlantic coasts (Grant Agreement No. 890850). She previously held research fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh, a Carson Fellowship at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at LMU Munich, and an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship at University College Cork.

Anna continues to be active as an independent researcher, working in the areas of coastal studies, arboreal humanities, and women's literary history. To find out more about her research projects, see below. 

Arboreal Landscapes & Coastal Romanticisms

Anna's research focuses on narratives of environmental change, particularly in relation to woodlands and coastscapes from the eighteenth- to the twenty-first centuries. With an emphasis on archival research, Anna's work combines methodologies and conceptual frameworks from ecocriticism, cultural geography, and environmental history. Her first monograph on narratives of deforestation and arboreal landscapes in Irish writing, due with Liverpool University Press, draws extensively on sources such as pamphlets, treatise, periodical culture, autobiographies, travel literatures, novels, and poetry. Her talk on "Woods and Irish Writing" for the Rachel Carson Center's lunchtime colloquium series can be found here. 

As part of her current "Coastal Routes" project, Anna co-organised with Prof Penny Fielding a workshop on the theme of "Scotland's Coastal Romanticisms". Together with Seán Hewitt, she co-edited a Special Issue of Nineteenth-Century Contexts on the theme of ‘Ecologies of the Atlantic Archipelago’ (2021). 

Women's Literary History

Her previous work focused on the reception history of Irish dramatist Lady Augusta Gregory. Anna published her doctoral work in a series of articles and book chapters that consider Gregory’s diverse audiences, both at home and abroad, as well as in print and on stage. Most recently, she contributed to the two-volume collection "The Golden Thread: Irish Women Playwrights". 

Across her projects, Anna is committed to the recovery of and critical analysis of women's writing. She is co-editor of Irish Women’s Writing, 1878-1922: Advancing the Cause of Liberty (Manchester University Press, 2016) and contributed a chapter on "The Rise of the Woman Writer" for Cambridge's Irish Literature in Transition series. 

Anna is an active contributor to a number of research networks in the fields of women’s writing, coastal history, and environmental humanities. For the Irish Women’s Writing (1880-1920) Network, for instance, she co-curates the interview series “Emerging Voices” that seeks to increase the visibility of the work of PhD candidates and early career researchers.

Through her "Coastal Routes" project, she has become active in the Coastal History Network for which she co-convenes the monthly Reading Group and bi-weekly Writing Group. 

Anna strongly believes in building and supporting an inclusive and diverse research culture and has previously chaired one of two Writing Support Groups of the European Society for Environmental History’s NEXTGATe initiative. Check out their activities if you're an early career scholar working in the field of environmental history. 

Anna is very excited to be part of the network LIT: Literature and Ireland's Trees. Led by Stephen O'Neill (Maynooth University), this network will host a public lecture series on "Literary Lives of Trees" and result in an exhibition and publication. 

She is furthermore part of a group of interdisciplinary scholars that seek to investigate 'Sounding Scotland's Waters', an RSE-funded project based at the University of St Andrews under the leadership of Dr Katie Garner. 

Anna has taught at both undergraduate and postgraduate level in the areas of Irish writing from the eighteenth- to the twentieth centuries, women’s studies, and Victorian literature at the University of Liverpool, Leeds Beckett University, University College Cork, and the University of Edinburgh. She has organised a range of skills workshops for postgraduates and early career scholars, with a particular focus on academic writing. 

She is currently untertaking the Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice and supervises MSc dissertation projects for English.