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Prof Jarlath Killeen B.A. (Dublin) Ph.D. (N.U.I.) F.T.C.D.Professor; Head of School

Teaching and Research Interests

My research focuses on the literature and culture of Victorian Britain and Ireland, though I also have a longstanding interest in eighteenth-century Ireland, especially the history and pre-history of Gothic literature on this island.

To date, I have written five monographs: two on Oscar Wilde - The Faiths of Oscar Wilde (Palgrave, 2005); The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde (Ashgate, 2007) - and three on Gothic literature: Gothic Ireland (Four Courts Press, 2005); Gothic Literature, 1825-1914 (University of Wales Press, 2009); The Emergence of Irish Gothic Fiction (Edinburgh University Press, 2013). All five focus extensively on the significance of religion in cultural studies. I have also edited three collections of essays on major writers of Irish Gothic literature, Oscar Wilde (Irish Academic Press, 2010); Bram Stoker (Four Courts Press, 2013); Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (Peter Lang, 2016). I also organized two major international symposia in Trinity College on Bram Stoker (2012) and Sheridan Le Fanu (2014).

My sixth monograph, Imagining the Irish Child: Discourses of Childhood in Irish Anglican Writing of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, will be published by Manchester University Press in 2023. The book examines the ways in which ideas about children, childhood and Ireland changed together in Irish Anglican writing. It will focus on different accounts of the child found in the work of a variety of Irish Anglican writers, theologians, philosophers, educationalists, politicians, and parents from the early seventeenth century up to the outbreak of the 1798 Rebellion. The book is structured around a detailed examination of five ‘versions’ of the child: the evil child, the vulnerable/innocent child, the believing child, the enlightened child, and the monstrous child. It traces these versions across a wide range of genres (novels, sermons, political pamphlets, letters, educational treatises, histories, catechisms and children’s bibles), showing how concepts of childhood related to debates about Irish nationality, politics and history across these two centuries. Irish Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion, which I have co-edited with Christina Morin, will be published by Edinburgh University Press in 2023. My edition of The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, by Arthur Conan Doyle, will be published by Oxford University Press in 2023.

At the moment, I am writing articles on theology and Irish Anglican gothic fiction, Victorian hygiene and Varney the Vampire, the nineteenth-century afterlife of Oliver Goldsmith, and the relationship between Ireland and Oscar Wilde.

Prior to my appointment to Trinity College, I was Lecturer in Victorian Literature in Keele University, Staffordshire (2004-05). I have also lectured in Irish Studies, in both Ireland (in University College Dublin) and Canada (at the University of Toronto),

I am convenor of the Senior Freshman module in Victorian Literature. Much of my teaching involves the study of popular literature, including Victorian Gothic and Victorian children’s literature, and I am particularly interested in the intersection of religion and literature, the popular romance, the discourse of the child in literature and culture, and Gothic and horror in all their manifestations.

I have supervised PhDs in many areas, including:

Thomas Hardy and the Law

Theodicy and the Victorian Novel

Cannibalism in Twentieth Century Culture

Beauty and the Nineteenth-Century Novel

Sheridan Le Fanu and Female Insanity

Christmas in Early Nineteenth-Century British Literary Culture

Islands in Contemporary Popular Culture

Food in the Children’s Literature of Roald Dahl

American Versions of Cinderella

Jane Austen and Fan Fiction

Sheridan Le Fanu and Settler Gothic

Publications

Imagining the Irish Child: Discourses of Childhood in Irish Anglican Writing of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2023).
The Emergence of Irish Gothic Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013).
Gothic Literature, 1825-1914 (Cardiff: Wales University Press, 2009).
The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde (London: Ashgate 2007).
Gothic Ireland: Horror and the Irish Anglican Imagination in the Long Eighteenth Century (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005).
The Faiths of Oscar Wilde: Catholicism, Folklore and Ireland (London: Palgrave, 2005).

Edited Editions

The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, by Arthur Conan Doyle (Oxford University Press, 2023).

Edited Collections

Irish Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023), co-edited with Christina Morin.
"Inspiring a Mysterious Terror": 200 Years of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2016), co-edited with Valeria Cavalli.
Bram Stoker: Centenary Essays (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2014).
Oscar Wilde: Irish Writers and Their Time (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2010).

Book Chapters

‘Stoker, Dracula, and the Critics’ in Dracula, by Bram Stoker, edited by David J. Skal and John Edgar Browning (New York: Norton, 2021).
‘Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and Victorian Ireland’. The Palgrave Handbook of Steam Age Gothic, Clive Bloom ed. London, Palgrave Macmillan (2021), 263-80.
‘Irish Gothic Fiction’. The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Fiction, Liam Harte, ed. Oxford, Oxford University Press (2020), 50-66.
‘Meeting Little Red Riding Hood Again: Harry Clarke and Charles Perrault’. Harry Clarke and Artistic Visions of the New Irish State, Angela Griffith, Marguerite Helmers and Róisín Kennedy, eds. Dublin, Irish Academic Press (2018), 225-46.
‘Nora Roberts: The Power of Love’. Twenty-First Century Popular Fiction, Bernice M. Murphy and Stephen Matterson eds, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press (2018), 53-65.
‘Picking Grandmamma's Pockets’ (written with Marion Durnin). Children's Literature Collections: Approaches to Research, Keith O'Sullivan and Pádraic Whyte, eds. London, Palgrave Macmillan (2017), 107-24.
‘Oscar Wilde in the Fourth Dimension: Ghosts, Geometry and the Victorian Crisis of Meaning’. The Routledge Handbook to the Ghost Story, Scott Brewster and Luke Thurston eds, London, Routledge (2017), 49-58.
‘Forgetting Le Fanu?’ "Inspiring a Mysterious Terror" 200 Years of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Jarlath Killeen and Valeria Cavalli eds. Oxford, Peter Lang (2016), 1-28.
‘Tod Slaughter’. Lost Souls of Horror and the Gothic: Fifty-Four Neglected Authors, Actors, Artists and Others, Elizabeth McCarthy and Bernice M. Murphy, eds. Jefferson, North Carolina, McFarland (2016), 200-03.
‘Muscling Up: Bram Stoker and Irish Masculinity in The Snake’s Pass’. Irish Gothics: Genres, Forms, Modes and Traditions, 1760-1890, Christina Morin and Niall Gillespie, eds. London, Palgrave (2014), 168-87.
‘Remembering Stoker’. Bram Stoker: Centenary Essays, Jarlath Killeen ed. Dublin, Four Courts Press (2014), 15-36.
‘An Irish Carmilla?’ Carmilla: An Edition with Critical Essays, Kathleen Costello-Sullivan, ed. New York, University of Syracuse Press (2013), 99-109.
‘Wilde, the Fairy Tales, and the Oral Tradition’. Oscar Wilde in Context, Peter Raby and Kerry Powell, eds. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press (2013), 186-94.
‘Emptying Time in Anthony Trollope's The Warden’. Victorian Time: Technologies, Standardizations, Catastrophes, Trish Ferguson, ed. London, Palgrave Macmillan (2013), 38-56.
‘Victorian Gothic Pulp Fiction’. The Victorian Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion, Andrew Smith and William Hughes, eds. Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press (2012), 43-56.
‘In the Name of the Mother: Perverse Maternity in "Carmilla"’. Reflections in a Glass Darkly: Essays on J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Gary William Crawford, Jim Rockhill and Brian Showers, eds. New York, Hippocampus Press (2011), 351-72.
‘Tim LaHaye, Left Behind and the Catholic Church’. Left Behind and the Evangelical Imagination, Crawford Gribben and Mark S. Sweetnam, eds. Sheffield, Sheffield Phoenix Press (2011), 69-83.
‘Evil Innocence: The Child and Adult in Fiction’. Irish Children's Literature and Culture: New Perspectives on Contemporary Writing, Valerie Coghlan and Keith O'Sullivan, eds. New York and London, Routledge (2011), 115-28.
‘Introduction: Wilde's Aphoristic Imagination’. Oscar Wilde: Irish Writers and Their Time, Jarlath Killeen, ed. Dublin, Irish Academic Press (2010), 1-23.
‘Gendering the Ghost Story? Victorian Women and the Challenge of the Phantom’. The Ghost Story from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century, Helen Conrad O'Briain and Julie Anne Stevens, ed. Dublin, Four Courts Press (2010), 81-96.
‘Teaching The Portrait of Mr. W. H.’ Approaches to Teaching Oscar Wilde, Philip E. Smith II, ed. New York, Modern Language Association of America (2008), 75-82.
‘Woman and Nation Revisited: Oscar Wilde's "The Nightingale and the Rose”’. Critical Ireland: New Essays in Literature and Culture, Aaron Kelly and Alan Gillis, eds. Dublin, Four Courts Press (2001), 141-7.
‘Diaspora, Empire, and the Religious Geography of Victorian Social Relations in Wilde's Fairy Tales’. New Voices in Irish Criticism, P. J. Matthews, ed. Dublin, Four Courts Press (2000), 183-9.

Journal Articles

‘Going Down the Drain: Sweeney Todd, Sewerage, and London Sanitation in the 1840s’. Lublin Studies in Modern Languages and Literature, 43, 2 (2019), 3-18.
‘The Greening of Oscar Wilde: Situating Ireland in the Wilde Wars’. Irish Studies Review, 23, 4 (2015), 424-50.
‘The New Adventures of Miss Sophia Berkley: Revisiting Ireland’s “First” Gothic Novel’ (with Christina Morin), Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 29 (2014), 159-63.
‘Irish Gothic Revisited’. The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, 4 (2008).
‘Irish Gothic: A Theoretical Introduction’. Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, 1 (2006).
‘Oscar Wilde and Feminism: Prolegomena’. The AnaAchronisT, 10 (2004), 46-60.
‘Mother and Child: Realism, Maternity, and Catholicism in Kate Chopin's The Awakening.’ Religion and the Arts, 7, 4 (2003), 413-38.