She is the author of Louise Michel in America: Rethinking Nineteenth-Century Radicalism on the Move, forthcoming from Rutgers UP in 2027, and Sensational Internationalism: the Paris Commune and the Remapping of American Memory in the Long Nineteenth Century (Edinburgh UP, 2016), which was awarded the 2017 Arthur Miller Centre First Book Prize in American Studies. She is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Food (Cambridge UP, 2020) and two volumes from Macmillan Collector’s Library: New York: A Literary Anthology (2026) and an edition of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and Other Stories (2018). She serves on the National Executive Committee of the University and College Union (UCU), is the founder and organizer of C19’s Americanists Abroad research cluster, and a former Steering Committee member of BrANCA: the British Association for Nineteenth-Century Americanists.  

Her research has been funded by the University of Tulsa’s Second Book Institute, a William P. Heidrich Visiting Research Fellowship from the University of Michigan, the British Association for American Studies and an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation fellowship at the Library Company of Philadelphia. 

She is passionate about making scholarly research accessible to broad public audiences and her public engagement work has been funded by two Social Responsibility grants from the University of Manchester’s School of Arts, Languages, and Cultures. Her engagement work includes “Tasting Children’s Literature: An Edible Read-a-thon,” an ongoing series of events for families and local primary school children exploring the gustatory side of children’s literature organized in partnership with Creative Manchester for the city’s annual Festival of Libraries; the “Digitising Radical Motherhood” project, a series of workshops organized in partnership with the Working Class Movement Library in Salford which brought together undergraduate students from the University of Manchester and local community members for hands-on training in digitizing rare archival materials and hands-on work to help digitize new (often under-utilised) materials from the WCML’s collections; and the “Re-imagining Motherhood Now” project, which brought together scholars, artists, activists and mental health practitioners for a series of immersive public events at the Whitworth and the Working Class Movement Library reflecting on the challenges of contemporary motherhood pre and post pandemic. 

In her previous role as Programme Director for American Studies at UoM and currently as REF lead for her department, she has launched a series of timely critical conversations aimed at academics and undergraduate students in the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures as well as the local community. Some of these well-attended events include “Abortion in the Pre/Post Roe Imagination,” a roundtable which featured Prof. Karen Weingarten (CUNY),  Belfast-based artist and abortion rights activist Emma Campbell and Dr. Coghlan’s colleagues, Dr. Monica Pearl and Dr. Molly Geidel; “Making Queer Photography Visible Now,” featuring V & A Curator Zorian Clayton in conversation with Dr. Coghlan’s colleague Prof. Jackie Stacey; and “Alternative Ecological Futures,” a panel discussion featuring Prof. Allison Carruth (Princeton) and Dr. Coghlan’s colleague Dr. Robert Spencer.