Personal Statement
Living and working in Liverpool since 2000, I am a native of the West of Ireland and was educated at University College Galway where I took BA and MA degrees before moving on to St John's College, Oxford where I completed my D. Phil. in 2000 under the supervision of Mr Tom Paulin. I have extensive experience of graduate student supervision and mentoring and welcome approaches from students interested in all aspects of Irish literature from the late nineteenth century onwards. I have successfully supervised doctoral students on these topics:

• Katharine Tynan, Winnifred Letts and the Irish Literary revival, 1890-1922
• Women of the Diaspora and the Irish Novel 1890-1916
• The Bell and its Circle 1940-1954
• ‘The Return to the People': Empire, Class, and Religion in Lady Gregory's Dramatic Works’
• The Argument with the Self: Individual and Community in Liam O’Flaherty, Patrick Kavanagh and John McGahern
• The Failure of the Irish Novel 1920-1965
• The Irish Literary Periodical 1904-1914
• Bohemian Networks in Dublin-Belfast-London, 1945-1966
• The Life and Work of Jim Phelan
• Whetstone: Stanislaus Joyce and the Fraternal Relationships in Finnegans Wake
• Finnegans Wake, Ulster and the road to Partition
• Joyce’s Gnomen: Tracing the Geometry of Bruno in Dubliners

Research Overview
I have research interests spanning the past 150 years of Irish literature and have published and delivered public lectures on a wide array of writers from well known figures such as James Joyce and W. B. Yeats to less well known writers such as Patrick Boyle and Stopford Brooke. In more recent years I have devoted my time to John McGahern and published my monograph Touchstones: John McGahern's Classical Style in 2016. My edition of McGahern's letters was published by Faber in September 2021 and I am currently working on his authorized biography. I was invited to deliver the annual Sir John T. Gilbert Lecture on the subject of 'John McGahern's Dublin' in 2020 and a copy of the lecture can be read here.John McGahern's Dublin

I have been awarded research grants over the past 25 years by a wide array of bodies, including the AHRC; St John's College, Oxford; the Leverhulme Trust; the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin; and the Moore Institute, University of Galway. In 2018-19 I was a British Academy Senior Research Fellow while completing my edition of The Letters of John McGahern (Faber, 2021). In 2024-25 I am the MH Abrams visiting research fellow at the National Humanities Center, North Carolina, completing work on the authorized biography of John McGahern, forthcoming from Faber. Visiting research fellow at the National Humanities Center, North Carolina