In an interview with the Trinity Long Room Hub she spoke about her research in Irish and British writing and the advice she would give to researchers at the beginning of their careers.
What attracted you to the study of Irish literature?
My undergraduate degree offered a very traditional version of English Literature, of the ‘Beowulf to Virginia Woolf’ kind, and I suppose I wanted to fill in some gaps after I finished it. Having grown up in Northern Ireland, I was aware that the dominant voices in literature at the time were very often Irish and that writers such as Seamus Heaney were important influences in poetry across both islands. So I came to Trinity as a postgraduate to join the very first year of what was then called the MPhil in Anglo Irish Literature—it’s now the MPhil in Irish Writing. Dublin was (and still is) a very vibrant place to study literature, and we had several inspiring lecturers, including Terence Brown, whose work in modern Irish cultural history remains a huge influence on my own research. I started to take an interest in Ireland’s complicated cultural and intellectual inheritances, and under Terence’s supervision I did my Phd on the nineteenth-century author Samuel Ferguson, who wrote in response to the various political settlements and unsettlements in Ireland that followed the Act of Union.
What projects are you currently working on?
I have just finished editing a volume of essays on Irish writing between 1940 to 1980, for Cambridge University Press’s Irish Literature in Transition series. It’s one of six volumes assessing the critical evolution of Irish literary studies, all due to appear in early 2020. When I get time, I’m also working on a book about the various ways English modernist writers wrote about Ireland’s revolutionary era from 1916 through to the Civil War. This has turned out to be a very timely discussion given the current political landscape, because it traces the anxious reflexes prompted in English culture by Irish politics in this period, and also highlights the parallel forces of English nationalism in the 1920s and early 1930s. I’m trying to think further about the concept of ‘England’ (rather than Britain) as a kind of literary imagining, cultivated in the interwar period through many of the same investments in folk tradition, the countryside -- even mythology and language -- that had already mobilised the Irish Revival.
What advice would you give to young researchers setting out on this path?
The university is a more complex and uncertain environment for researchers today than when I started out. I think it’s very rare that a research student gets a clear run through four years of a higher degree without some difficulties – academic, financial, personal— that they have to deal with, and that’s now part of the learning experience at postgraduate level. Research students need to be prepared to accommodate problems that are not only research problems, they can be life problems as well. 
On the plus side, there are tremendous opportunities now for research collaborations and networking that didn’t exist when I did my doctorate, so the experience has become both more sociable and more professional. Above anything else, I would advise research students to enjoy what they do, and stay flexible when it comes to employment options. I’m incredibly proud of my own postgraduates - I’ve now supervised about 17 of them through to a full doctorate, and I’ve also had the chance to mentor some very talented postdoctoral fellows who’ve gone on to publish, or into university careers. It’s rewarding to have shared in their various academic journeys, and I still keep in touch with them all.
Speaking from personal experience, what would you say to women seeking to build their careers as researchers and academics?
We live in a university culture heavily driven by research metrics and grant capture, and this often sits awkwardly beside the multiple demands of family life. That said, since I came twenty years ago, there have been significant advances in making Trinity and the university system in general much more family-friendly. My own School has been nothing but supportive in this regard. But work still needs to be done on promoting women to academic leadership roles, and in supporting all staff who are carers of some kind. Of course, we’re also battling with many less tangible factors of economic, racial and and class inequality in relation to university access, before we even begin to think about an even playing field at the researcher stage. I think I would advise all early-career academics that they may occasionally encounter lingering forms of discrimination, and that they need to be able to identify such instances and challenge them.
What have been some of the most enjoyable projects you’ve worked on and why?
Too many to list, but for example, I’ve recently enjoyed helping out on a new digitial exhibition curated by one of our former postgraduates, Dr Conor Linnie, called ‘The Poetics of Print’. This a wonderful display of material produced by some of Ireland’s twentieth-century small poetry presses. These boutique publishing ventures, such as Dun Emer, Cuala or Gayfield Press, were very often run by women, and consistently produced high-quality art text with exquisite illustrations. The exhibition also tells a useful story about the small-business culture behind a lot of modern Irish literary production. And it was yet another reminder of the unique resources we have in Trinity Library: the exhibition showcases several rare items from the Library archives, including the original Cuala hand-printing press. The librarians were a huge help and a vital part of the collaboration.
You have recently been appointed as Deputy Director of the Trinity Long Room Hub, what do you think the Institute means for the research community in Trinity?
The Hub has achieved an incredible amount in the past decade. Ten years ago it was a building site, now it’s a major international research institute with a premier-league profile. I think I see its clearest impact in the renewed confidence it has given to the Arts and Humanities disciplines in Trinity – a confidence that we have a significant voice in global conversations, and more, the authority to initiate and orient those conversations. It has helped us to take our work out of the academy and into public discourse. 
That’s been very important. And the Hub has been the cradle for some really valuable, even ground-breaking interdisciplinary engagements. My own field, English Literary Studies, has always integrated naturally with cognate subjects such as History and Classics, but now we’re negotiating with Law and Political Science, to look into concepts of civic identity or populism or the language of constitutions, for example, and we’ve also been involved with colleagues in Economics to see how well quantative analysis can measure creative productivity. Increasingly, the Hub is providing a platform for more engagement with STEM subjects. The success of Neurohumanities in Trinity is evidence of a very productive crossover, one that has great potential for researchers in literature and the arts.
What do you perceive as the immediate challenges for researchers in Europe over the coming decade?
Well, challenge number one for me is maintaining our role and relevance within Europe. Whether deliberately or by default, Brexit risks establishing conceptual barriers between Ireland and the rest of Europe, along with obstructive limit lines around the United Kingdom. I think the Hub has a real responsibility now to marshal its troops in Arts and Humanities, to stop the Brexit process interfering in the research work we do with Europe, including Britain. But the situation is more critical and goes beyond questions of academic partnerships and funding arrangements. We need to collaborate further with the European academic community to address the collapse of both the ecological and democratic systems we once took for granted. How do we continue to show cultural and intellectual leadership across such a volatile landscape? And at the same time, how can we maintain the long-term integrity of scholarship when a crisis-driven discourse keeps pushing for immediate, sometimes knee-jerk solutions?
What’s the next book on your reading list?
I’m very fortunate this year to be chairing the judging panel of the international Pollard Poetry Prize, which is hosted by Trinity and sponsored by a very generous donor. So I have about 36 volumes of poetry at home, and I’m reading through them with great pleasure. And I also have Daphne du Maurier’s short stories on my bedside table – I got hold of these initially in order to read one specific tale, about an English ex-military saboteur hiding out on the Irish border-- but I got sidetracked by the rest of the stories, including the brilliant ‘Don’t Look Now’ which is even more chilling than the film version. Probably not a good idea for bedtime reading!
The Poetics of Print exhibition is featured in the Irish Times here, and can be accessed here on the Library of Trinity College Dublin.