Ian Campbell Ross, Cav. dell'Ordine della Stella d'Italia,
B.A. (Sus), M.A. (Dub), Ph.D. (Edin), F.T.C.D.Professor Emeritus
Ian Campbell Ross held a personal chair as Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies until his retirement; he is now an Emeritus Professor and Fellow Emeritus of the College.
Among his recent publications are an edition of The Vicar of Wakefield (co-edited with Professor Aileen Douglas), the first volume in the projected 8-volume Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith (Cambridge University Press, 2024-28), and essays in Oliver Goldsmith in Context (CUP, 2024), Jonathan Swift in Context (CUP, 2024), and The Library (2024). Other publications include ‘“We Irish”: Writing and Identity from Berkeley to Burke’ in Irish Literature in Transition 1700-1780 (CUP, 2020), ‘Maria Edgeworth and the Culture of Improvement’ (Firenze University Press, 2019), and ‘”Alas, Poor YORICK!”’ Public Domain Review: Selected Essays (PDR Press, 2019).
A co-General Editor of the Early Irish Fiction series (Four Courts Press), Professor Ross co-edited the anonymously authored Vertue Rewarded (2010), Sarah Butler’s Irish Tales (2010), and Elizabeth Sheridan’s The Triumph of Prudence over Passion (2011), and edited William Chaigneau’s The History of Jack Connor (2013). Earlier publications include a widely praised biography, Laurence Sterne: a life (OUP, 2001), and a critical edition, with new introduction, of Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1983; rev. OUP, 2009). He contributed ‘Prose to 1800’ to the Cambridge History of Irish Literature (2006) and a chapter on Tobias Smollett in the Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature (2006). A co-editor of Locating Swift (FCP, 1998), he contributed ‘Irish Fiction before 1800’ to the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (1991-2002) and is author of Swift’s Ireland (1985).
Work on poetry has included co-edited texts, with introductions, of the verse of the mid-eighteenth century poet Dominick Kelly, published in Eighteenth-Century Ireland (2018, 2020) and a co-authored essay, ‘The Poor Scholar’, in History Ireland (2021).
Editor and principal contributor to Public Virtue, Public Love: the early years of the Dublin Lying-in Hospital, the Rotunda (1986), he was a founder of the Eighteenth-Century Ireland Society (https://www.ecis.ie 1985-) and of its journal, Eighteenth-Century Ireland / Iris an dá chultúr (https://www.ecis.ie/journal/ 1986), which he co-edited for 10 years. In 2007, he founded the Eighteenth-Century Literature Research Network in Ireland, linking all interested teachers and students of eighteenth-century literature throughout the island of Ireland, which he convened until 2018.
Professor Ross taught English literature from Chaucer to the present day and has published on American and European literatures from the seventeenth to twenty-first centuries. He is editor of Henry James, The Europeans (1985; rev. 2000) in the Oxford World’s Classics series, and has published essays and articles on writers from Voltaire to Italo Calvino. His sophister option, ‘Detective Fiction’ was the first course of its kind in Ireland. An introduction to Declan Burke (ed), Down these Green Streets: Irish Crime Writing in the 21st Century (2011) was the first overview of Irish crime fiction from 1840 to the present day. With the historian Professor William Meier (TCU), he edited the special issue of the interdisciplinary Éire-Ireland: ‘Crime in Ireland since 1921’ (Spring/Summer 2014). His chapter, ‘Crime Fiction’ appeared in Liam Harte (ed), The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Fiction (OUP, 2020).
A co-founder of the Centre for Irish-Scottish and Comparative Studies, Ian Campbell Ross chaired the international steering committee of the Irish-Scottish Academic Initiative. He is a member of the advisory board of the Journal for Irish and Scottish Studies, the Irish University Review, and Eighteenth-Century Ireland/Iris an dá chultúr, and was for many years Co-Editor of Irish Writing in English for the online Literary Encyclopedia.
Editor and translator of Gian Gaspare Napolitano’s In guerra con gli scozzesi as To War with The Black Watch (Birlinn, 2007), Professor Ross has been a visiting professor at the Università degli Studi, Roma Tre, where he is also a membro aggregato of the Centro di ricerca interdipartimentale per gli studi irlandesi e scozzesi. His Umbria: a cultural history (Viking, 1995) was published in a fifth, expanded and updated, edition (Volumnia, 2020).
Professor Ross is a frequent lecturer in Italy and was Visiting Professor at the Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines in 2013-14.
In 2007 the President of Italy honoured him as a Cavaliere dell’Ordine della Stella della Solidarietà Italiana (now Ordine della Stella d’Italia).
Contact
Ian Campbell Ross
E-Mail: icross@tcd.ie