Dr. Tom Walker

Biography

I came to Trinity in 2011. Previously I worked as a lecturer at the University of Oxford, where I also completed my doctorate. My research and teaching interests are mainly focused on late nineteenth and twentieth-century Irish writing, especially poetry. I also have interests through this period in the relationship between literature and the other arts, the cultural history of philosophical idealism, questions of allusion and collaboration, and the place of literature in periodicals and on the radio. My book-length study Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of his Time was published in 2015 by Oxford University Press. It drew on extensive archival research on both sides of the Irish Sea and the Atlantic to illuminate MacNeice's considerable contact with Irish literary networks and with contemporaneous Irish poetry. It was awarded the 2015 Robert Rhodes Prize for Books on Literature by the American Conference for Irish Studies. Other past publications include research on the fiction of Flann O'Brien and John McGahern, the place of the literary within Northern Irish writing, the radio poetry of Richard Murphy, Irish-British poetic relations at mid-century. I have also co-edited a special issue of the journal Modernist Cultures on modernism's 'Collaborative Poetics' and a book of essays on the poetry of Derek Mahon. My main ongoing current area of research focuses on the work of W.B. Yeats, and especially the relationship between his work and nineteenth and twentieth-century art writing, encompassing the many textual forms through which art spectatorship and writing were combined during the period, ranging from aesthetic philosophy to art history to exhibition reviews to ekphrastic poems. This research was supported by an Irish Research Council New Horizons Research Project Grant during 2015-17 and has led to various publications, including several journal articles, book chapters, and my co-editing of The Edinburgh Companion to W.B. Yeats and the Arts (2024). I am also currently completing a monograph provisionally entitled 'W.B. Yeats and the Writing of Art'. I teach on a wide range of undergraduate modules. In recent years, this has included co-convening the Junior Fresh 'Genres' module and lecturing on the Senior Fresh 'Modernisms' module, as well as offering specialist option modules on 'Nineteenth-Century Art Writing', 'W.B. Yeats' and 'Irish Poetry after Yeats. At postgraduate level, I contribute to various modules on the MPhil in Irish Writing, including co-convening a module focused on the work of Eavan Boland. I have supervised many PhD students and mentored several postdoctoral fellows as part of various Research Ireland and Leverhulme Trust schemes. I am always interested to hear from potential doctoral students and early careers researchers.