Staff Research and Supervision Interests
Dr Julie Bates: Contemporary Irish writing; Samuel Beckett; Environmental Humanities.
Dr Jane Carroll: Children’s literature, landscape, visual texts, fantasy literature, material culture in children’s literature, archives and children's literature collections.
Dr Clare Clarke: Victorian popular literature; crime and detective fiction and film; late-Victorian literature and culture; nineteenth-century newspaper and periodical culture. PhDs supervised: the work of Gillian Flynn; Sherlock Holmes and Dark Tourism.
Dr Philip Coleman: Chiefly interested in US American literature, especially poetry and short fiction. Also interested in contemporary poetry, modernism, and the relationship between literature and philosophy. Interested in supervising in these and related areas.
Prof. Aileen Douglas: Print culture; eighteenth-century writing especially fiction; women’s writing with a particular focus on Maria Edgeworth. Current and recent topics of PhD supervision include Visual Elements in the Novel; Servants in 18th century Fiction; Maria Edgeworth; Fanny Burney; Natural Philosophy in early-eighteenth century Dublin.
Dr Paul Delaney: Primary interests: Irish short fiction; censorship; post-independence Irish literary culture. General interests: 20th century and contemporary Irish writing; representations of Travellers and other minority groups in Irish culture; anglophone short fiction. Supervision: Dr Delaney has previously supervised PhDs on a number of topics, including: working-class Irish writing; Traveller autobiographies; Frank O’Connor; John Banville; and Irish-American queer literature. He is currently supervising projects on Conor Cruise O’Brien, and on contemporary Irish women’s short fiction; he is also co-supervising a PhD in Literary Practice.
Dr Mark Faulkner: Old and Middle English language and literature, especially late Old English and early Middle English; manuscript studies; translation; history of the English Language. I have previously supervised PhDs on Anglo-Latin prayers, Anglo-Saxon ideas about Alexander the Great and the Old English Bede. I am currently supervising one developing big data approaches to lexical change between Old and Middle English, looking particularly at the vocabulary of saints’ lives.
Dr Seán Hewitt: Twentieth-century British and Irish writing; the Irish Literary Revival; Literature and Science; Modernist Studies; Environmental Criticism; Contemporary poetry and poetics.
Professor Darryl Jones: Popular Literature; Horror fiction and film; Jane Austen; mass death and catastrophe fiction. Other interests: Victorian and Edwardian adventure fiction; ideas of Britishness in popular culture.
Dr Alice Jorgensen: Old English poetry and prose, especially Ælfric and late poetry; history of emotions, especially shame; the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle; women and gender; representations of violence; Vikings.
Dr Jarlath Killeen: Primary Interests: Victorian Literature; Oscar Wilde; the Gothic (particularly Irish Gothic); Children's Literature; the relationship between religion and literature. Other Interests: eighteenth-century Irish literature; the popular romance and chick-lit.
Dr Rosie Lavan: Twentieth-century Irish and British literature and culture; Seamus Heaney and his contexts; literature and the media; life-writing; poetic form.
Professor Stephen Matterson: 19th and 20th century American literature generally. I’m especially interested in poetry, literature and race, literary nationalism, and the writings of Herman Melville. Interested in supervising in most areas of American Literature, and in modern and contemporary poetry.
Professor Chris Morash: has published widely in the field of Irish Studies, on Yeats, Irish theatre history, Irish media history, famine literature, and has a particular interest in spatial theory and urban studies. He has supervised research in these and related areas.
Dr Amy Prendergast: Literature of the long eighteenth century, especially the areas of women’s writing, life writing, writing from Ireland, and Franco-Irish connections and cultural transfers. Also interested in literary sociability and associational life.
Prof Andy Murphy: My areas of specialisation lie primarily in the fields of Shakespeare Studies and Irish Studies. I have a particular interest in the history of the editing, publishing and reception of Shakespeare's work and am interested in book history more generally. In terms of Irish studies, my particular interests lie in the intersections between history, politics and culture in Ireland in the period from the late nineteenth century through to the present. I am also interested in nationalism and culture in both an Irish and a British context and in theories of nationalism as they apply to culture.
Current and past PhD topics I have supervised include: evolving conceptions of national identity in early modern literature; considerations of race in film adaptations of Othello; Seamus Heaney's poetics; restoration and eighteenth-century political appropriations of the plays of Ben Jonson; the cultural context of editions of Shakespeare's sonnets; the translation and reception of Irish literature in early twentieth-century China.
Dr Bernice M. Murphy: Main research interests: the writing of Shirley Jackson; American horror and Gothic narratives; place and space in the American Gothic; Suburban Gothic and Rural Gothic, literary and filmic representations of California. Other interests: the thriller; true crime; Folk Horror, twentieth and twenty-first century popular fiction. PhDs Supervised: Censorship, Children and the Horror Genre; The Forest and the EcoGothic; American EcoHorror, the lesser-known works of Shirley Jackson.
Dr Brendan O’Connell: Fourteenth- and fifteenth-century poetry, particularly the works of Chaucer, Gower and the 'Gawain'-poet.
Dr Melanie Otto: Any area of postcolonial writing, in particular Caribbean literature, literatures of the Americas, and New Zealand writing; interdisciplinary projects, particularly those involving the visual arts. Current PhD Supervision:
• Language and the Symbolic in the work of Derek Walcott, William Butler Yeats, and Adonis. Completed PhD Supervision:
• Black gay male identity in the African diaspora (2018)
• Landscape and environment in the work of Jean Rhys and Elizabeth Bowen(2013)
• Space and place in the work of Maeve Brennan (2012)
Professor Eve Patten: Research interests in nineteenth-century Irish cultural history and twentieth-century British and Irish fiction.
Dr Kevin Power: Creative writing (practice and pedagogy), with an emphasis on prose fiction; politics in 20th and 21st century American literature and film; contemporary Irish fiction; science fiction.
Dr Björn Quiring: Primary interests: poetics of law and literature; early modern English literature, especially William Shakespeare and John Milton; literary theory in its relation to philosophy, particularly Walter Benjamin, Hans Blumenberg, Gilles Deleuze and William Empson. Secondary interests: William Wordsworth; James Joyce; literature of horror and the fantastic.
Dr Sam Slote: Primary Interests: Joyce, Beckett, theory, genetic criticism, Modernism/Post Modernism. Other interests: the interface between literature and philosophy; literature and science, Pynchon, Naboko
Dr Mark Sweetnam: Digital Humanities, digital textual editing, seventeenth century literature, with a focus on the literature of the Reformation and early-modern science, millennialism and the cultures of evangelicalism.
Dr Ema Vyroubalová: Primary Interests: Sixteenth and seventeenth-century literature, especially drama; 20th and 21st century adaptations of Shakespeare on stage and screen, especially non-Anglophone ones. Other interests: translation studies, travel narrative, literary representations of animals. Previously supervised PhDs: Shakespeare in Iran; Fairies in Early Modern English Drama; Royalist Women Writers, 1642-1660.
Dr Tom Walker: Twentieth-century Irish writing and cultural history (especially poetry); literature’s relationship to visual arts; influence, allusion and collaboration; literature and terror; literature on the radio; history of philosophical idealism. Dr Walker has supervised Phds on a variety of topics including the cultural geography of the post-partition Irish novel, and Louis MacNeice and the discourses of mind.
Dr Pádraic Whyte: Children's Literature; Childhood and Literature; Queer Literatures; Myths and Legends (Irish); Cities and Literature; Masculinities; and Children's Literature Collections; 19th and 20th century Irish Literature.
Dr Pádraic Whyte has supervised theses in the areas of Irish myth and folktales, magical objects in literature for children, and representations of histories in children's literature.