Liam Harte

Liam Harte is Profesor of Irish Literature at the University of Manchester. He studied English and History at the University of Galway and earned a DPhil in English Literature at Trinity College Dublin. His first academic post was in the Department of Irish Studies at St Mary’s University in London, after which he lectured in the English Department at the University of Ulster, before joining the Department of English and American Studies at Manchester in 2004. He sits on the editorial boards of several academic journals, including the Irish University Review and New Hibernia Review, and was the 2008 Armstrong Visiting Professor of Irish Studies at the University of Toronto.

Liam's chief research interests lie in the fields of modern and contemporary Irish literature and the literature and culture of the Irish diaspora. He has published widely on various aspects of Irish fiction since Joyce, as evidenced by his co-edited volume, Contemporary Irish Fiction: Themes, Tropes, Theories (Palgrave Macmillan, 2000) and monograph, Reading the Contemporary Irish Novel 1987-2007 (Wiley Blackwell, 2014). He followed up his 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 became the basis for a stage play, My English Tongue, My Irish Heart, written by Martin Lynch, which toured Ireland and the UK in 2015, aided by a grant award from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). His other books include A History of Irish Autobiography (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Fiction (Oxford University Press, 2020). He was Principal Investigator on a major AHRC-funded research project entitled 'Conflict, Memory and Migration: Northern Ireland Migrants and the Troubles in Great Britain', which ran from 2019 to 2022.

Recent 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).