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Professor Chris Morash B.A. (Dalhousie), M.Phil (Dublin), Ph.D. (Dublin), FTCD, MRIA Seamus Heaney Professor of Irish Writing

Research and Teaching Interests

Chris Morash is the inaugural Seamus Heaney Professor of Irish Writing. His research interests range across a number of areas in the wider field of Irish Studies.  His most recent book is Yeats on Theatre (Cambridge, 2021), which argues that we should consider Yeats to be an important theorist of the modern stage. It builds on an interest in Irish theatre that includes The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Theatre (Oxford, 2016; co-edited with his Nicholas Grene) and Mapping Irish Theatre: Theories of Space and Place (co-authored with Shaun Richards, Cambridge, 2013).   His previous major publication in this area was 'A History of Irish Theatre, 1601-2000' (Cambridge, 2002), which won the Theatre Book Prize in 2003, and has become a standard history of Irish theatre.  Edited works on Irish theatre include Teresa Deevy Reclaimed, 2 Vols. (with Jonathan Banks and John Harrington; Mint Theatre, 2011 & 2015); Shifting Scenes: Irish Theatre-Going 1955-1985 (edited with Nicholas Grene; Carysfort, 2008); and Irish Theatre on Tour (edited with Nicholas Grene; Carysfort, 2005), In 2021, he curated a series of audio plays for the Abbey Theatre, Unseen Plays, which involved more than 150 actors performing nine plays.

He has also published in Irish cultural and literary studies more widely. A History of the Media in Ireland (Cambridge, 2009) was the first book to trace the media in Ireland from the earliest printed book to the present, and in 2015 he co-edited a special issue of Eire-Ireland (with Robert Savage) on Irish media history (50 1&2, Spring/Summer 2015).   He has published on the Transatlantic Telegraph in the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies in 2021, and this interest led to him joining an expedition to trace part of the line of the Australian Overland Telegraph in 2022. He also contributed an essay on the telegraph to the publication States of Entanglement, which accompanied the Irish entry to the Venice Biennale in 2021. His first monograph was Writing the Irish Famine (Oxford, 1995), and he has published widely on Irish Famine writing, including The Hungry Voice: Poetry of the Irish Famine (Irish Academic Press, 1989; rev. ed. 2009) and Fearful Realities: New Perspectives on the Irish Famine (with Richard Hayes; Irish Academic Press, 1996).  In total, he has published more than fifty articles and essays, and welcomes enquiries from prospective research students in all areas of Irish studies.

Prior to his appointment to Trinity, Chris Morash worked in Maynooth University, where he had been Professor of English and had founded the Centre for Media Studies. From 2009 to 2014 he served as Chair of the Compliance Committee of the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland, with statutory responsibility for regulation of Irish broadcasting. He is currently on the board of the Irish Theatre Institute. He has held visiting posts at the University of Tampa (2016), Augsburg (2015), Notre Dame (2015), and Beijing Foreign Studies University (2007), and in 2022 was the MacGeorge Fellow at the University of Melbourne. He was elected to Membership of the Royal Irish Academy in 2007, and to Fellowship of TCD in 2016. He served as Vice-Provost of Trinity College Dublin from 2016-19. Prof. Morash’s next book, Dublin: A Writer’s City, will be published by Cambridge in 2023, inaugurating the Imagining Cities series, for which he is series editor. He has also been commissioned to edit The Cambridge History of the Irish Novel. Since 2019 he has chaired the judging panel for the International Dublin Literary Award, the world’s richest prize for a single work in English.