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Dr. Rosie Lavan B.A. (Oxon), M.A. (London), M.St (Oxon), D.Phil (Oxon)Assistant Professor; Co-director, MPhil in Irish Writing

After reading English at St Anne’s College, Oxford, I trained as a journalist at City University, London. I worked on the business desk at The Times for two years, as a media assistant to a London MEP, and for Hansard in the House of Lords. I returned to Oxford for postgraduate research and completed my doctorate in 2014. I held stipendiary lectureships in English at St Hugh’s and St Anne’s Colleges, Oxford, before joining the School of English at Trinity in 2015.

Research

My research centres on literature, culture and society in twentieth-century Ireland and Britain. Prominent interests include the intersections between literature, politics, and the media; comparative approaches to literature and the visual arts, especially photography; life-writing; textual criticism; poetic form; and literature and culture during the world wars.

I am a leading scholar of Seamus Heaney’s writing. I am currently co-editing, with the poet and critic Bernard O’Donoghue, the poems of Seamus Heaney for Faber & Faber. My monograph, Seamus Heaney and Society (Oxford University Press, 2020) resituated Heaney’s work in its varied textual, cultural, institutional, and political contexts, with close attention to his work for radio and television, and his key institutional affiliations in publishing, broadcasting, and education, in Ireland, Britain, and the United States.

My current monograph project, Watching Ourselves at a Distance, examines how writers, photographers and film-makers have represented and negotiated the forces and effects of collective experience in twentieth-century Ireland. It surveys the period which encompasses Ireland’s full emergence as a Republic, the economic and cultural privations of the 1950s, the modernising drive of the 1960s, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and the women’s movement. I focus on genres which have some apparent, although never straightforward, relationship with personal or historical ‘truth’ – lyric poetry, journalism, (auto)biography, photography, and documentary film. All the writers and artists under discussion are engaged, wilfully or otherwise, in examining what Padraic Fallon called “the new mysteries of statehood” in Ireland: what, from the mid-century onwards, the Republic means and what it is; and how modernisation, urbanisation, secularisation, and globalisation have been achieved and can be understood through the filters of artistic subjectivity. Generational experience and the uses of retrospect and nostalgia, in official discourse, literary and cultural production, and personal accounts, are central to my analysis. The project is anchored in chapter-length discussions of the poets Padraic Fallon, Eavan Boland, and Seamus Heaney, accompanied by considerations of Edna O’Brien, Nell McCafferty, and the filmmaker Pat Collins. For research towards this project, I have held visiting fellowships at the Moore Institute at the National University of Ireland, Galway, the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library at Emory University in Georgia, and the Z. Smith Reynolds at Wake Forest University, North Carolina.

Beyond this, I am preparing a project, provisionally titled ‘The Extension of Literature’ which adopts the methodologies I have developed in my research to date, using archival resources in Ireland and Britain to chart the work and networks of literary editors, broadcasters and publishers in the post-1945 period.

Teaching

I convene or contribute to a range of undergraduate courses in the School of English covering Irish and British literature and culture since 1900. At Fresher level I co-ordinate ‘Cultures of Retelling’, which examines issues of adaptation, translation, and reception history, and contribute to the module ‘Irish Writing’. Sophister modules in recent years have focused on Seamus Heaney’s prose; emigration and Irish writers and artists in post-war Britain; literature, culture and identity in England from 1945 to 1973; and David Jones’s WW1 poem In Parenthesis.

I co-convene the MPhil in Irish Writing and have taught and co-taught modules on modern Irish poetry, and Eavan Boland. I also contribute classes on gender and censorship in post-Emergency Ireland, and literary representations of the Troubles.

I welcome enquiries for supervision or mentoring from potential postgraduate or postdoctoral researchers on topics related to my interests and expertise. Current and recent graduate supervision includes projects on modern and contemporary poetry, photography and the ethics of representation, genetic criticism, and Irish women’s writing.

Recent and Forthcoming Publications

Books:

Seamus Heaney and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).

Chapters and Articles:

‘No Orpheus: Eavan Boland and the ‘loneliness of the mythical’’, in Isabelle Torrance ed., Irish Migrations and Classical Antiquity: forthcoming from Bloomsbury in 2024.

‘Encountering The Post-Revival Poet: Eavan Boland, Padraic Fallon, and Sheila Wingfield’ in Gregory Castle ed., Irish Revivals: forthcoming fromCambridge University Press in 2024.

‘Heaney and Education’ in Geraldine Higgins ed., Seamus Heaney in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), pp. 241-251.

‘Violence, Politics and Irish Poetry’, in Eve Patten ed., Irish Literature in Transition, vol. 5, 1940-1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 216-232.

‘‘Mycenae Lookout’ and the Example of Aeschylus’, in Stephen Harrison, Fiona Macintosh, and Helen Eastman eds., Seamus Heaney and the Classics: Bann Valley Muses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 50-68.

‘“Number weight & measure”: “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” and the Labor of Imagination’, International Yeats Studies 4:1 (2019).

‘Image, Text and Conflict: Approaching the Border in Willie Doherty’s Work’ in Nicola Gardini, Adriana Jacobs, Ben Morgan, Mohamed-Salah Omri and Matthew Reynolds eds., Minding Borders: Resilient Divisions in Literature, the Body and the Academy (Leeds: Legenda, 2018), pp. 97-114.

‘The World of Sense in In Parenthesis’ Jamie Callison, Paul Fiddes, Anna Johnson and Erik Tonning eds., David Jones: A Christian Modernist? (Leiden: Brill, 2018): pp. 92-106.

‘Active Images: Heaney and Derry’, Honest Ulsterman (Summer 2016).

‘Heaney and the Audience’, Essays in Criticism 66:1 (2016), pp. 54-70.

‘Screening Belfast: “Heaney in Limboland” and the Language of Belonging’, Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies, 21:2 (2015), pp. 301-16.

‘Explorations: Seamus Heaney and Education’, The Irish Review 49-50 (Winter-Spring 2015), pp.54 – 70.

Reviews:

Review of Thomas Goldpaugh and Jamie Callison (eds). The Grail Mass and Other Works, by David Jones in Review of English Studies 71:299 (April 2020), pp. 407-409.
Review of Martina Evans, Now We Can Talk Openly about Men, and Maria McManus, Available Light, in Poetry Ireland Review 126 (2018), pp. 15-19.
Review of Michael Longley, One Wide Expanse: Writings from the Ireland Chair of Poetry, Harry Clifton, Ireland and its Elsewheres: Writings from the Ireland Chair of Poetry, and Paula Meehan, Imaginary Bonnets with Real Bees in Them: Writings from the Ireland Chair of Poetry, Irish University Review 47 (Autumn/Winter 2017), pp. 587-90.
Review of S. J. Perry, Chameleon Poet: R. S. Thomas and the Literary Tradition, and Rory Waterman, Belonging and Estrangement in the Poetry of Philip Larkin, R. S. Thomas and Charles Causley, Notes & Queries 64:1 (March 2017), pp. 195-7.
Review of Paul Muldoon, ‘Whispers of T. S. Eliot’, the inaugural T. S. Eliot Lecture at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, Time Present 91 (Spring 2017), p. 7.
Review of Hearing Heaney: The Sixth Seamus Heaney Lectures, eds. Eugene McNulty & Ciarán Mac Murchaidh, Irish Literary Supplement 36:2 (Spring 2017), pp. 25-6.
Review of Yeats and Modern Poetry, by Edna Longley, Irish Review 52 (Summer 2016), pp. 73-5.
Review of Poetry, by David Constantine, Notes and Queries, 62:4 (2015), pp. 641-43.
Review of The Poor Bugger's Tool: Irish Modernism, Queer Labor, and Postcolonial History, by Patrick R. Mullen, Notes & Queries, 62: 1 (2015), pp. 175-77.