Profile

My research focuses primarily on twentieth-century British and Irish literature, global modernism, postmodernism, and postcolonial literature and cinema. My first book, Empire's Wake, traces the development of a distinctly postcolonial late modernism that begins to emerge in Irish writing in the late 1920s and effectively culminates in the 1950s with some of Samuel Beckett's key works.  Empire's Wake explores how the lively intellectual exchanges of this often neglected period of Irish writing help shed new light on the postcolonial legacies of Irish modernism and provide an important backdrop for understanding the effects of reconfiguring imperial space within a rubric of globalization in the post World War II era. My current book project, Not Such A Long Way To Tipperary: Retracing Opposition to the First World War in Irish Popular Culture, explores the vibrant counterculture established by Irish feminists, nationalists, trade unionists, and pacifists to build opposition to Irish involvement in the First World War between 1914 and 1918. Looking at literary texts alongside a lively periodical culture and a nascent Irish cinema, the book explores an overlooked chapter in Irish cultural history that underpins the developments of the Irish Literary Revival and the dynamic revolutionary era that fueled it. My research on the project has been supported by a Mayers Fellowship from the Huntington Library and a Burkhardt Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS).I teach a range of courses in modern British, Irish and postcolonial literatures as well as courses in Irish cinema and the history of the novel.  I also direct a study-abroad program based in Galway, Ireland in the summer.