Shane McCorristine is a cultural historian with research interests in spiritualism and psychical research in British culture, the literature of the supernatural, surrealism, and Arctic exploration during the Victorian period. He received his PhD in History from University College Dublin in 2008 and since then has worked on research projects in Paris (Irish participation in Bourbon naval forces) and at UCD (history of Irish Victorian science). He has been a Visiting Research Fellow with the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. Since October 2010, he has been a Government of Ireland CARA Postdoctoral Mobility Fellow at National University of Ireland, Maynooth and Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge.
McCorristine joined the Center to develop a new research project entitled “Dreamscapes of the Arctic in Nineteenth-Century Narratives of Exploration,” which looks at the role of disembodied and supernatural categories in how Victorians thought about Arctic place. His project asked how ideas of the Arctic as a "dream world," where one could become disembodied, function as articulated through explorative accounts, media, and literature.