Additional Information

PhD Supervision: 

Whelan, Mariah. Viaduct and Trauma and Representation in Three Irish Novels (2020).

Schluter, Laura. Bodies of Shame and the Shame of Bodies: Reading the Gendered Shame Complex in the Fiction of John McGahern and Edna O'Brien (2019).

Bates, Juliet. Home and the Unhomely in the Fiction of John Banville, Graham Swift and Jane Gardam (2016).

Stedman, Jane. A Time of Interregnum: Navigating Nation in Devolutionary Scottish Fiction (2016).

Georgiades, Electra. Trauma, Company and Witnessing in Samuel Beckett's Postwar Drama, 1952-61 (2014).

Bristow, Daniel. Waking the Read: What Does it Mean to be Post-Joycean? In Reading, Writing and Psychoanalysis (2014).

Haworth, Simon. Places Where a Thought Might Grow: Liminality, Culture and the Troubles in the Poetry of Derek Mahon (2013).

Turiano, Veronica. Reinventing the Real: Hyperreality in the Plays of Martin McDonagh (2013).

After studying English and History at the National University of Ireland, Galway, I earned a DPhil in English Literature at Trinity College Dublin. My first academic post was in the Department of Irish Studies at St Mary’s University in London, after which I lectured in the English Department at the University of Ulster, before joining the Division of English, American Studies and Creative Writing at Manchester in 2004.

My chief research interests lie in the fields of modern and contemporary Irish literature and the literature of the Irish diaspora. I have published widely on various aspects of Irish fiction since Joyce, as evidenced by my co-edited volume, Contemporary Irish Fiction: Themes, Tropes, Theories (Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), and my monograph, Reading the Contemporary Irish Novel 1987-2007 (Wiley Blackwell, 2014). I followed up my multi-authored survey of the Irish autobiographical tradition, Modern Irish Autobiography: Self, Nation and Society (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), with The Literature of the Irish in Britain: Autobiography and Memoir, 1725-2001 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), which was a Book of the Year in both the Times Literary Supplement and the Irish Independent. This study became the basis for a well-received stage play, My English Tongue, My Irish Heart, written by Martin Lynch, which toured Ireland and the UK in May 2015, aided by a Follow-on Funding Award from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. My latest book is A History of Irish Autobiography (Cambridge University Press, 2018). I sit on the editorial boards of four academic journals and I was the 2008 Armstrong Visiting Professor of Irish Studies at the University of Toronto.

Research Awards

2019-21: Arts and Humanities Research Council Large Grant Award

2015:  Arts and Humanities Research Council Connected Communities Festival Award

2014-15:  Arts and Humanities Research Council Follow-on Funding Award

2008:  Arts and Humanities Research Council Research Leave Award