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Dr. Julie Bates B.A., Ph.D. (Dublin)Associate Professor in Irish Writing

 


Research

My research contributes primarily to Beckett Studies and Irish Studies. I have a particular interest in writers and artists who are formally inventive while restricting themselves to certain obsessively recurring themes and preoccupations, who make creative use of discarded materials, and who work with both text and image. My research is increasingly stimulated by ideas from Environmental Humanities.

My first book, Beckett's Art of Salvage, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2017. I have published articles and chapters in the Journal of Beckett Studie, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, and the Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Theatre. My current Beckett research follows two strands: the first draws on Environmental Humanities and considers the potential of Beckett’s writing to productively undermine anthropocentrism or human exceptionality, and to address or reconceptualise relationships between the human, nonhuman animal, and environment. The second strand of my Beckett research seeks to disrupt the masculinist heritage in which he has been inscribed.

Within Irish Studies, I have published on modern and contemporary fiction, non-fiction, and visual art. My current book project is a study of the American writer and artist Erica Van Horn, who has been living in rural Tipperary since 1996, where she runs Coracle Press with the poet Simon Cutts. Van Horn is a book artist who often takes as her subject matter her immediate daily environment. Van Horn’s work offers an interesting perspective on contemporary Irish life because it adopts a deliberately marginal position and focuses on daily encounters and experiences, often local customs or linguistic practices that perplex the outsider.

In 2022 I co-edited a special issue of Word & Image with Léa Vuong (University of Sydney). ‘Louise Bourgeois: Through the Archives’ presented new scholarship emerging from the French-American artist’s recently opened New York archive. The issue featured contributions in English and French by art history and literary critics, museum and gallery professionals, and established the central place of writing in Bourgeois’s practice.

Supervision

I welcome expressions of interest from prospective PhD students or postdoctoral researchers whose research interests align with mine, or who are interested in writing about modern or contemporary literature, small presses, Beckett Studies, Irish Studies, or Environmental Humanities.  

Teaching

At undergraduate level, I teach the Sophister options ‘Samuel Beckett: Afterlives’ and ‘Coracle Press and Erica Van Horn: Living Locally’. With Jane Carroll, I coordinate the module ‘Exploring Heritage Collections’ which is open to Sophister students and professionals working in cultural institutions around Dublin, and funded through the HEA’s Human Capital Initiative. I teach the drama component of the Junior Fresher module ‘Genres: Introduction to Literary Studies’, coordinate the Senior Fresher module ‘Imagining the Contemporary: No Future?’, and contribute lectures on Beckett to ‘Reading Ireland’ and the Columbia Dual Degree programme. At MPhil level I coordinate the option module ‘Samuel Beckett and Environmental Humanities’. I also teach on the core ‘Perspectives’ module for the MPhil in Modern and Contemporary Literary Studies.

School of English Roles

Director of Undergraduate Teaching & Learning (2023-25)
Co-Director of the MPhil in Irish Writing (2019-23)
President of DU Players (since 2019)

Beckett Studies Roles

Executive Board member of the Samuel Beckett Society (2023-27)
Co-Director with Katherine Weiss (Cal State LA) of the Early Career Scholars Network in Beckett Studies (since 2023)
Director of the Trinity Beckett Creative Fellowships in collaboration with the University of Reading, UK (since 2022)
Co-Director of the Trinity Centre for Beckett Studies (since 2018)

Editing Roles

Books Editor of the Irish University Review (2022-25)
Editorial Board Member of Short Fiction in Theory & Practice (since 2021)

Selected Publications

Monograph

Journal Special Issue

Journal Articles

Book Chapters

  • ‘Writing with air in The Third Policeman’, Flann O'Brien and the Nonhuman: Animals, Environments, Machines, eds. Paul Fagan, Katherine Ebury, John Greaney (Cork University Press, 2024), 23pp.

  • ‘Essayism in contemporary Ireland’, The New Irish Studies: Twenty-First-Century Critical Revisions, ed. Paige Reynolds (Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 228-243: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108564205.014

  • ‘Beckett at the Gate’, The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Theatre, eds. Nicholas Grene and Christopher Morash (Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 478-493: https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198706137.013.31

  • ‘Writing homelessness: the fugitive literature of Samuel Beckett and W.G. Sebald’, Irish Culture and Wartime Europe 1938-48, eds. Dorothea Depner and Guy Woodward (Four Courts Press, 2015), pp. 150-175

Contact

Room 4077
Arts Building
School of English
Trinity College Dublin

E-mail: batesju@tcd.ie

     

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