Dean Browne announced as Arts Council Writer in Residence at University College Cork

· Dean Browne announced as 2026 Arts Council Writer in Residence at University College Cork.

· The collaboration between the Arts Council and UCC celebrates diverse artistic voices and practices shaping Ireland’s creative landscape.

University College Cork (UCC) and the Arts Council have announced poet Dean Browne as the 2026 Writer in Residence.

UCC is one of six universities to partner with the Arts Council on this flagship programme, which reflects the diversity and richness of Ireland’s creative landscape, with programmes spanning Traditional Arts, Digital Arts, Literature and Film.

These awards, jointly funded by the Arts Council and UCC, provide artists with dedicated workspaces and finances to develop their work and further Ireland’s vibrant creative scene.

Dean Browne received the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2020 and his pamphlet, Kitchens at Night, was a winner of the Poetry Business International Pamphlet Competition; it was published by Smith|Doorstop in 2022.

His poems have appeared widely, in outlets including The Irish Times, London Magazine, New York Review of Books, Poetry Magazine, Stinging Fly. His first collection After Party is published by Picador and is a Poetry Society Recommendation.

Maura McGrath, Chair of the Arts Council, said: “As Chair of the Arts Council, I am delighted to congratulate the new Artists in Residence across our universities. These programmes support artists to deepen their practice while bringing fresh creative energy into teaching, research and campus life. By connecting students and staff with professional artists, they spark new ideas and show how creativity can enrich every discipline. We are very grateful to our university partners for their ongoing commitment to these residencies.”

Dr Kerri Andrews, Head of Creative Writing, UCC School of English and Digital Humanities, said: “I’m delighted to welcome Dean Browne as Writer in Residence at UCC next year. A poet of immense talent, Dean’s commitment to supporting and nurturing the next generation of writers is deep rooted, and the whole UCC community will benefit from Dean's presence on campus in 2026.”

Dean Browne joins Brendan Canty, Arts Council – UCC Film Artist in Residence; Aoife Ní Bhriain, Arts Council – UCC Traditional Artist in Residence; and Alan Butler as the first Arts Council Digital Artist in Residence at UCC. Read more: https://www.ucc.ie/en/news/2025/university-college-cork-and-arts-council-announce-2026-artists-in-residence.html

Ms Aisling O'Leary

Tel:            021-4902241

Email:        a.oleary@ucc.ie 

Ms Louisa O'Reilly

Tel:             021-4902664

Email:         louisaoreilly@ucc.ie

Ms Becky Walton

Tel:             021-4903677

Email:        BWalton@ucc.ie 

Dr Joanna Wharton

Dr Joanna Wharton researches the intersections of literature, science and technology, and empire, with a focus on writing by women in eighteenth-century and Romantic-era Britain and Ireland. Her first monograph, Material Enlightenment: Women Writers and the Science of Mind, 1770–1830 (Boydell, 2018), examined the contributions of Anna Letitia Barbauld, Maria Edgeworth, Hannah More and others to early psychological discourse and educational practice. Before joining UCC, Joanna lectured at the University of York and at Birkbeck, University of London, and held research positions at the University of St Andrews and Georg-August-Universität Göttingen. 

Joanna is Principal Investigator of Lines of Communication: Telegraphy, Literature, and Security in Ireland and the British Empire, 1794–1850 (LINC), funded by the Taighde Éireann – Research Ireland Pathway Programme. The project explores infrastructures of secret and high-speed intelligence in Ireland and the British empire, centring on the optical telegraph, a human-powered signalling machine that promised to revolutionize long-distance communication at the close of the eighteenth century. A key focus of the project is the work of Maria Edgeworth and the telegraph invented by her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, which was adapted for use by the British East India Company in Bengal. By emphasising the interplay between telegraphy and literature in the pre-electrical era, and by attending closely to the crises and failures of the telegraph’s use in colonial surveillance networks, LINC aims to provide new perspectives on narratives of state security and insecurity, particularly in the context of Ireland’s complex relationship with British imperialism. 

Dr Charlotte Goodge

Dr Charlotte Goodge is a postdoctoral researcher on the Insight SFI Research Ireland Centre for Data Analytics project Data Travels on the Irish Sea (2026). Data Travels aims to trace and digitally visualise both the journey and relationship networks of the numerous visitors to Plas Newydd in Wales (c.1780—1831), home to Romantic-era celebrities, keen antiquarians and modern queer icons Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, the Irish-born ‘Ladies of Llangollen’. Charlotte graduated with a PhD from the University of York in the summer of 2025 and has since completed a 2025/26 Visiting Early Career Research Fellowship with the John Rylands Research Institute (JRRI), University of Manchester between September 2025 and January 2026. Charlotte’s own, current research groups together and examines Romantic-era women’s unpublished, anglophone travel writing and explores within this distinct corpus what she refers to as ‘ecologies’ of the European labouring classes. This incipient project has already been generously supported both by the Rylands Fellowship and a British Association of Romantic Studies’ (BARS) Stephen Copley award in 2025.

Charlotte’s doctoral research and recent publications (see the Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies (2023) and Eighteenth-Century Life (2025)) have focused on backdating and rebalancing a history of the fat female body both in Britain and its Empire while also emphasising the manifold, as well as intersectional, nature of fat embodiment in the Georgian era.

Dr Danny Shanahan

Dr Danny Shanahan is a visiting postdoctoral fellow working collaboratively between Stanford University and UCC. He completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2023 and completed an Irish Research Council postdoctoral fellowship at UCC in 2025. His first monograph, ‘Literature and Emergency Law in Kashmir and Northern Ireland: Disturbed Areas’ (Forthcoming with Bloomsbury), combines law and literature studies with legal history to reveal the common British colonial roots of modern emergency laws used in the conflicts in Kashmir and Northern Ireland.

He joined Stanford’s Department of African and African American studies in 2025 through Horizon Europe’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellowship. His time in the department will see him research a second monograph, provisionally entitled 'Waking the Dead: Fiction and the Archival Gap in Ireland, India and the Black Atlantic'. Waking the Dead examines the problem of the archival gap — the impossibility of knowing much of the lives of the historically ‘unimportant’ — and asks how contemporary fiction imagines these lives anew. For decades, cutting-edge scholarship studying colonialism and its aftermath in Ireland, India and the Black Atlantic have worked on the same problem: if archives, the central object of study in mainstream historiography, only contain the written records of the powerful, then how can historians know anything substantial about the lives of the powerless? The study will expand this field of research by investigating contemporary fiction’s dynamic engagement with the archival gap, and what aesthetic, formal and thematic strategies writers employ to imagine individual lives we can know very little about.

Dr Elisabetta Magnanti

Dr Elisabetta Magnanti is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the School of English and Digital Humanities at University College Cork and a Visiting Research Fellow in the School of English at Trinity College Dublin.

She holds a PhD in History from the University of Vienna, an MSc in Computer Science for Electronic Text Processing, and an MA in Germanic Philology, having undertaken further training at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence for Big Data and Text Processing, and at the University of Oxford in Digital Humanities.

Her research specialises in the application of computational methods to palaeographical and philological analysis of Old English and Anglo-Latin source material.

Since 2022, in collaboration with Prof. Mark Faulkner (Trinity College Dublin), Elisabetta has been co-developing Ansund, a project harnessing Computer Vision and Machine Learning to create a new, exhaustive, open-access corpus of Old English. A Proof-of-Concept article, 'Corpus Palaeography: Machine Learning, Scribal Profiling and the Dating and Localisation of Manuscripts Containing Old English, c. 800–1200’ is forthcoming in Speculum (2027).

Her ongoing collaborations include Measuring and Recording Manuscript Word Division Using Computer Vision, a Biblissima+ Exploratory project with Profs. Dominique Stutzmann (IRHT-CNRS) and Mark Faulkner, and Data Engineering for Old English: Partnering to Enhance the Dictionary of Old English for Its Compilers and Users (DEfOE), with Profs. Stephen Pelle (Dictionary of Old English / University of Toronto) and Mark Faulkner.

Another major strand of her research investigates the manuscript transmission, dissemination, and reception of Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, with particular attention to the earliest witnesses of the work. She has recently identified a previously unknown early ninth-century manuscript of Cædmon’s Hymn forthcoming in Early Medieval England and its Neighbours (olim Anglo-Saxon England) and is currently preparing a major grant application to support further research in this area.

Prior to joining Trinity College Dublin in 2025, Elisabetta was affiliated with the University of Vienna (2021-25) and the Department for Science and Information Technology at the headquarters of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris (2019-21).

Dr Sophie Corser

Dr Sophie Corser’s research focuses on issues of reading in modern and contemporary literature and criticism. Her first monograph, The Reader’s Joyce: Ulysses, Authorship, and the Authority of the Reader (under contract with Edinburgh University Press), rethinks the relationships between author, reader, and text through a study of James Joyce’s Ulysses. After working on Joyce for several years, Sophie has more recently been exploring her interests in intertextuality, metacriticism, classical reception, and formal experimentation within the field of contemporary writing; this informs her Irish Research Council funded project, ‘Women Reading in Contemporary Anglophone Writing: Disruptive Representations’. Before joining UCC, she held a Leverhulme Trust Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at University College Dublin from 2019-21, following the completion of her PhD from Goldsmiths, University of London in 2018.  

As a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of English from 2021-23, Sophie’s research will examine representations of reading through a comparative analysis of contemporary works of women’s writing in English: short stories, novels, poetry, and hybrid texts merging memoir, fiction, and criticism. Through experimental uses of form, these various texts represent reading as an activity with the potential to radically unsettle how women perceive themselves and their relationships to the world around them. Responding to these innovations, this project will revise concepts of reading to emphasise its creative, active, and disruptive properties; rethinking notions of ‘the woman reader’ and the act of reading itself.  

Dr Ailbhe McDaid

Dr Ailbhe McDaid is a graduate of UCC (BA, English and Irish), Trinity College Dublin (MPhil, Literature) and University of Otago, New Zealand (PhD). Her first monograph, The Poetics of Migration in Contemporary Irish Poetry, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2017 and she has published articles and book chapters on poetry, migration, memory studies and the literature of conflict. In 2017, Ailbhe was awarded the Busteed Postdoctoral Research Fellowship by the Institute of Irish Studies, University of Liverpool for her project 'Women and War: conflict, bereavement and Irish cultural memory’. Most recently, Ailbhe held a role as Lecturer in English at Maynooth University.

Dr James L. Smith

Dr James L. Smith is Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of English and Digital Humanities at University College Cork, working on the 2019-23 EU Regional Development project Ports, Past and Present. His work is at the intersection of the blue, environmental, spatial and digital humanities. His first monograph is Water in Medieval Intellectual Culture: Case-Studies from Twelfth-Century Monasticism (Brepols, 2018). James is the editor of The Passenger: Medieval Texts and Transits (punctum books, 2017), and co-editor of the Open Library of the Humanities collection New Approaches to Medieval Water Studies (2019). His current monograph project has the working title of Deep Maps of Lough Derg.

Dr Anna McKay’s research focuses on confinement and the British maritime world. Her PhD on British prison ships was an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded Collaborative Doctoral Project between the University of Leicester and the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. She joins UCC in January 2021, following her post as Pearsall Fellow in Naval and Maritime History at the Institute of Historical Research, London (2019-20). Prior to this, she undertook a Caird Library Research Fellowship at Royal Museums Greenwich (2019). She has a BA in English and Related Literature and MA in Global Eighteenth Century Studies from the University of York. Anna has secured a range of grants, awards, and bursaries to support her doctoral and postdoctoral research. She has taught at University College London and the University of Leicester, taken part in the Edinburgh Television Festival’s ‘TV PhD’ scheme, and worked as a UK Research and Innovation policy intern at the Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport at their Whitehall office. 

Anna was awarded an IRC Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Research Fellowship to write her monograph, ‘British Prison Hulks, 1775-1875: Wicked Noah’s Arks?’, and develop various public-facing outputs. As a member of the School of English, Anna will interrogate a wealth of government correspondence, letters, diaries, and news media that demonstrate how prisoners, parliament and the public experienced and conceptualised shipboard confinement in England, Bermuda, Ireland, and Gibraltar between the years 1775-1875.   

Dr Edward Molloy

Edward was awarded his PhD from Queen's University Belfast for his doctoral thesis entitled 'Race, History, Nationality: An Intellectual History of the Young Ireland movement 1842-52'.  Previously, he studied at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he received a distinction in the MA programme in Postcolonial Culture and Global Policy.   Before that he studied at the University of Glasgow. He joined the University of Liverpool Institute of Irish Studies as a Busteed Postdoctoral Scholar in the summer of 2018 before being appointed lecturer there the following year. He has also taught at Queen's University, Belfast and Newham College in East London. Edward has also worked as a researcher for the Electoral Reform Society. He has recently been awarded a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship for his two year project entitled ´Between History and Revolution: Radical Irish Separatism from Tone to Pearse´, which re-evaluates the intellectual underpinning of Irish nationalism in the long nineteenth century.

Dr. Emma Penney

Dr. Emma Penney is a GOIPD postdoctoral fellow in the Department of English where she is working on her monograph provisionally titled Social-Class and the Women’s Movement in Ireland: A Second look at the Second-Wave. She holds a ‘New Foundations’ Government of Ireland research grant at UCD through which she aims to establish a Working-Class Studies Network and organise Ireland’s first Working-Class Studies conference. As a recently elected ‘At-Large’ steering committee member of the Working-Class Studies Association of America (WCSA), Emma hopes to facilitate links between emergent scholarship in Ireland and the United States. To support the development and consolidation of working-class writing in Ireland, Emma continues to build an archive of working-class women’s creative and intellectual history - through her doctoral field research Emma acquired previously uncollected works from working-class communities, much like her own. She has published with The Irish University Review, The Journal of Working-Class Studies and The Journal of International Women’s Studies (forthcoming). Her research and teaching interests also include decolonial approaches to Irish Studies and the reconfiguring of Irish historiography to better face up to state racism and other challenges that are historically embedded in Irish culture. She enjoys building supportive networks among working-class, first generation and financially insecure faculty and staff and enjoys listening to other working-class students and academics about their own experiences in higher education

Dr Colleen Taylor

Dr. Colleen Taylor joins the UCC School of English after earning her PhD from Boston College in 2020. She holds an MPhil in Irish Writing from Trinity College Dublin and a BA from Fordham University, where she was Valedictorian in 2012. Colleen specializes in eighteenth-century Irish and British literature, material culture, and feminism, and has published articles on these topics in Éire-Ireland: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Irish Studies, Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, and Persuasions: the Jane Austen Journal. She also contributed a book chapter on Irish feminist playwrights to Ireland, Enlightenment and the English Stage, 1740-1820. Colleen has taught courses on satire, eighteenth and nineteenth-century literature, and Irish women’s writing at Boston College, the latter of which won the American Conference for Eighteenth-Century Studies Innovative Course Design Competition in 2018.

Before coming to UCC, Colleen spent time researching at Queen’s University Belfast under the Irish Studies Exchange Fellowship and was a visiting researcher at Boston College Ireland as winner of the Dalsimer Fellowship. She has also been the recipient of the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures scholarship. Colleen is currently working on a monograph that introduces and applies new materialist theory to Irish Studies. Her project, Irish Writing and the New Materialism: Objects of Irish Character, 1720-1830, funded by the Irish Research Council, examines the development of an Irish, Enlightenment-era subjectivity through material objects that defined Irish national character, such as coins, mantles, linen, and spinning wheels. Her research examines the material details of eighteenth-century Irish life in order to expand scholarly understanding of colonial culture in that century, particularly the interconnectedness of subjective human expression and material thing, which appears in writings by Jonathan Swift, Maria Edgeworth, and Sydney Owenson. When she's not spending her time in the eighteenth century, Colleen writes a music column for the Irish Echo newspaper in New York.

Dr Jonathan Evershed

Dr Jonathan Evershed is a political anthropologist with a research interest in postcolonial politics, culture, heritage and identity in the UK and Ireland. His first monograph, Ghosts of the Somme: Commemoration and Culture War in Northern Ireland (University of Notre Dame Press, 2018) is  an ethnographic examination of Ulster Loyalist identity and the contested politics of commemoration in Northern Ireland during the Decade of Centenaries (2012-2022/23). Before joining Ports, Past and Present, Jonathan was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Government and Politics at UCC, where his work as part of the ESRC-funded project, Between Two Unions: The constitutional future of the islands after Brexit focused on the implications of Brexit for the island of Ireland and for British-Irish relations. He is currently working on a co-authored book with the working title, Brexit and Northern Ireland's Constitutional Futures. 

Dr Tim Groenland

Dr Tim Groenland’s research focuses on the role of literary editors in twentieth- and twenty-first century American fiction. His first book, The Art of Editing: Raymond Carver and David Foster Wallace, was published in 2019 by Bloomsbury Academic. As the recipient of an IRC Postgraduate Scholarship, he completed a PhD from Trinity College Dublin in 2016; since then, he has held (fixed-term) positions as Lecturer in American Literature and Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary English Literature in the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin. His writing has appeared in Critique, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Dublin Review of Books, among other venues.

While at the School of English, Dr Groenland will be researching the role of editors in post-war US magazine fiction – specifically, Theodore Solotaroff’s editing of the New American Review/American Review (1967-1977).

Dr Joseph Shafer

Dr Joseph Shafer specializes in twentieth-century American poetry, transatlanticism, critical theory and aesthetics. He received his PhD from the University of Warwick in 2018, and previously studied at Dartmouth College. In 2018, he was awarded a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Auburn University, and, in 2019, a Visiting Research Fellowship at the University of Oxford's Rothermere American Institute. His PhD dissertation introduced the privileged transatlantic reception of D.H. Lawrence within America's post-WWII poetic communities, and how that reception critiques Lawrence criticism and alters counter-cultural literary history and its varying forms.

His current monograph, The Flesh of Literal Space: Aesthetics, Politics and Page in Post-1945 American Literature, offers a new lexicon for addressing types of literary space and their different relations, in order to introduce an overlooked yet underlined politic in the poetry and poetic prose of writers such as Charles Olson, Susan Howe, Robert Duncan, Ronald Johnson, Sylvia Plath, Kathy Acker, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Stephen Jonas, Jayne Cortez, and Sonia Sanchez. Aside from related publications in literary and cultural studies, in journals such as Arizona Quarterly, Textual Practice, Journal of American Studies, D.H. Lawrence Review, PN Review and Oxford Literary Review, Shafer has published on Jacques Rancière, two forthcoming book chapters on Lacan's aesthetics in Reading Lacan's Seminar VIII: On Transference, another on Badiou's modernist aesthetics, and an interview with Rancière.

Dr Kenneth Keating

Dr Kenneth Keating joins the School of English as an IRC Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow in October 2017, having studied at University College Dublin where he was awarded a PhD in 2014. He is the author of Contemporary Irish Poetry and the Canon: Critical Limitations and Textual Liberations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and has published widely on modern and contemporary poetry. He was previously a postdoctoral researcher working on the Digital Platform for Contemporary Irish Writing. He is currently editing a collection of essays on the work of Maurice Scully, forthcoming with Shearsman Books, and is the editor of Smithereens Press. His current postdoctoral research examines Transnationalism and poetic form in contemporary Irish poetry in an effort to reconceptualize conventional understandings of nation-centred literary inheritance.

Dr Declan Taggart

In October 2017, Declan Taggart was awarded an IRC Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship at the School of English in UCC to write a monograph entitled Rethinking old gods: An investigation of Old Norse conceptions of the divine under the mentorship of Dr Thomas Birkett. His work examines cognitive variation in representations of Old Norse deities and their perceived interactions with the human world, touching on areas like the difference between theological and non-theological religious concepts, perceptions of divine intervention and representations of morality.

Declan is the author of How Thor Lost His Thunder (Routledge, forthcoming), which is adapted from his doctoral thesis ‘Understanding diversity in Old Norse religion taking Þórr as a case study’ (University of Aberdeen, 2015). He graduated with a BA in English Literature from Durham University and an MA in Medieval Studies from the University of York, and after finishing his doctoral studies he undertook a research stay at Stockholm University’s Department of Ethnology, History of Religions and Gender Studies, sponsored by the Royal Gustavus Adolphus Academy for Swedish Folk Culture’s Bernadotte Programme. He has also taught seminars in the History department of the University of Aberdeen, and he regularly publishes popular articles about topics of historical and cultural interest, often related to Old Norse culture and society.

Dr Brandon C. Yen

Brandon C. Yen holds a PhD from Queens’ College, University of Cambridge. He is the author of ‘The Excursion’ and Wordsworth’s Iconography (recently accepted for publication by Liverpool University Press) and, with Peter Dale, The Spirit of Paradise: The Gardens of William Wordsworth and the Poetry of his Flowers (to be published by ACC Art Books in spring 2017). Prior to coming to UCC as an IRC Postdoctoral Fellow, he was an Early Career Fellow jointly supported by the Wordsworth Trust and the British Association for Romantic Studies. In March 2017, he curated an exhibition on ‘Wordsworth’s Flowers’ for the Wordsworth Museum in Grasmere. His project at UCC is entitled ‘Wordsworth’s Ireland: Belonging in Ireland and Britain’.

Dr Laura Lovejoy

Dr Laura Lovejoy was awarded her PhD at University College Dublin in 2017 and joins the School of English as an IRC Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow in October 2017. At UCC, Dr Lovejoy will develop her doctoral research into a monograph, States of Decline: Irish Modernism, Degeneration and the Body. The monograph maps the relationship between Irish literary modernism and degeneration and explores the intersections between themes of decline and modes of embodiment in works of Irish modernist fiction published in the 1920s and 1930s. Her research interests include modernism and biopolitics and her work has been published in the journal Humanities.

Dr Rachel Murphy

Rachel is a postdoctoral researcher on Deep Maps: West Cork Coastal Cultures, an interdisciplinary project led by Prof Claire Connolly (School of English) and Dr. Rob McAllen (School of BEES). The project, which is funded by the Irish Research Council, investigates the biological, cultural and historical context of the south west coast of Ireland from 1700 to 1920.

Rachel is a graduate of the University of Oxford where she studied English Language and Literature. After graduating, she spent 20 years working in strategy, marketing and project management for companies including Lloyds of London, Accenture, eBay, PayPal and Eneclann. During this time she completed a Postgraduate Diploma in Marketing from the Chartered Institute of Marketing (UK). She holds an MA in the History of Family from the University of Limerick and a Higher Diploma in Geographical Information Systems (GIS) from University College Cork.

Rachel recently completed a PhD in History and Digital Humanities at UCC, funded under a PRTLI-5 Digital Arts and Humanities Postgraduate Fellowship (2011-2015). Her thesis examined 'Place, Community and Organisation on the Courtown Estates, 1649-1977' and used GIS to map the Earl of Courtown's Irish estates over time.

Twitter: @rachelmurphy, Website: rachelmurphy.ie

Dr Michael Nott

Dr Michael Nott received his PhD in 2015 from the University of St Andrews. He joined UCC as an IRC Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow in October 2016. In 2016/2017 he was a visiting Fulbright fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. His Fulbright/IRC project is entitled “Thom Gunn and Anglo-American Poetry: Transient and Resident”, and he is mentored by Prof Alex Davis. He is the author of “Photopoetry, 1845-2015: A Critical History” (Bloomsbury, forthcoming). 

Dr Mary O'Connell

Dr Mary O’Connell received her PhD from the School of English, University College Cork, in 2009. From 2012-2013 she was Leverhulme Visiting Fellow at the School of English, University of St. Andrews. She is the co-editor of Readings on Audience and Textual Materiality (Pickering & Chatto, 2011). Her first monograph, Byron and John Murray: A Poet and His Publisher was published by Liverpool University Press in 2014. Her research interests include Romantic literature, particularly the work of Byron, and publishing history in the 18th and 19th centuries. She is currently writing a biography of the second John Murray.

Dr Roderick Dale

Dr Roderick Dale joined the School of English in February 2015 to work on the IRC 'New Horizons' World-Tree Project, a digital multimedia archive of teaching and study resources about the Vikings. He previously taught Old English at the University of Nottingham where he completed his doctoral thesis on Berserkir: A re-examination of the phenomenon in literature and life and was awarded his PhD in 2014. He is currently working on a monograph based on his doctoral thesis. Prior to obtaining his PhD, Roderick worked and published as an archaeologist, and is co-author of The Viking Experience. He is mentored by Dr Tom Birkett.

Dr Anna Pilz

Dr Anna Pilz studied at the European University Viadrina (Germany) and Liverpool’s Institute of Irish Studies where she received her PhD in 2013. Her doctoral thesis examined the relationship between playwright Augusta Gregory and her audiences. She has published articles on Gregory’s class politics and short stories. Joining the School of English as Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow in October 2014, she is working on a monograph on Trees, Inheritance and Estates in Irish Writing. She is co-editor of a collection of essays on Irish Women’s Writing, 1878-1922: Advancing the Cause of Liberty, forthcoming with Manchester University Press in 2015.

Her research interests include the Irish Literary Revival, theatre history, and landscape and national identity in Irish writing. She has previously lectured at Liverpool’s Centre for Lifelong Learning and Leeds Metropolitan University. She is currently on the editorial advisory board for The Onslaught Press. https://liverpool.academia.edu/AnnaPilz

Beth Ahern

Beth Aherne is a PhD student in the School of English and Digital Humanities. Her supervisors are Dr Miranda Corcoran and Dr Maureen O’Connor. Beth completed both her Joint Bachelor’s degree in Sociology and English and her Master’s in English - Modernities: Literature, Theory and Culture from the Romantics to the Present in UCC.

Her research focuses on representations of the family in American science fiction. In particular, she is concerned with portrayals of queer families in feminist, Afrofuturist, and Indigenous futurist science fiction novels. Her research project is entitled “Queering the Family in Science Fiction: An Intersectional Approach”.

Gabrielle Dufrene

Gabrielle Dufrene is a PhD student in the School of English and Digital Humanities under the supervision of Dr Alan Gibbs and Dr Adam Hanna. Originally from the American South, she has a BA in English with minors in Marketing and Communications from Loyola University Chicago and a First-Class Honours MA in Creative Writing from UCC.

Gabrielle’s project, An Island on a Sea of Grief: Irish Women Writers and Trauma, explores which literary forms have proved the most useful for Irish women seeking to write about gendered trauma, questioning whether the critical canon on memoir and fiction relating to women’s trauma in Ireland suggests that different genres have received divergent responses. Her research centers on contemporary Irish authors, including Eimear McBride, Anne Enright, Claire Keegan, Anna Burns, Louise Kennedy and Doireann Ní Ghríofa.

Ioannis Kaprosioutis

Ioannis Kaprosioutis is a PhD student in the School of English and Digital Humanities under the supervision of Professor Graham Allen and Dr Alan Gibbs. He is a graduate of the School of English from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, and an MA graduate (First Class Honours) in "English - Modernities" from University College Cork, Ireland.

His research traces the ambivalent nature of Mikhail Bakhtin’s carnival and grotesque theory to explore the theme of transgression in diverse mediums, namely in Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories, William Blake’s poetry, and in the political caricatures of James Gillray. By treating carnival as a cultural analytic, the above texts are investigated through the methodological viewpoints of post-structuralism and deconstruction theory to generate multiple interpretations of texts and produce on-going political, cultural, and literary discourses.

Hanke Kelber 

Molly Twomey

Molly Twomey grew up in Lismore, County Waterford, and now lives in Cork. She published two poetry collections with the Gallery Press: Raised Among Vultures (2022) and Chic to be Sad (2025), supported by literature bursaries from the Arts Council.

Her debut collection won the Southword Debut Collection Poetry Award and was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Poetry Prize for Best First Collection. She holds an MA in Creative Writing and is a PhD Excellence Scholar at University College Cork. 

Charlotte Troy

Charlotte Troy is a third year PhD student in the School of English and Digital Humanities and is a recipient of the Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholarship. Her PhD thesis is titled, "EcoGothic Gardens and the Collapse of Social Binaries," which is being supervised by Dr. Maureen O'Connor and Dr. Miranda Corcoran.

This research addresses the fragile relationship between the human and nonhuman world through an analysis of literary gardens in mid-twentieth to early twenty-first-century American Gothic novels. The Gothic literary mode focuses on narratives that explore unequal power dynamics, which often exclude certain social classes, genders, and races from occupying positions of authority. The application of an EcoGothic lens (non-anthropocentric approach) to literary representations of the garden, extends this study of power dynamics to consider the human relationship with the nonhuman world and how this provides insights into social constructs such as gender, class, race, and sex.

John O'Boyle

John O'Boyle holds a First-Class Honours BA in English and First-Class Honours MA in Creative Writing, both from UCC. His PhD builds from his MA, comprising a novel in addition to literary research.

John writes in the genre of speculative fiction, and the primary intent of his novel is to demystify decolonial practices both past and present. He also explores topics such as the development of gender under colonial conditions, technological demands in the face of ecological catastrophe, and national relations between colony and metropole.

His research focuses on popular depictions of decolonialism in contemporary media, analysing the ways material conditions in which narratives are constructed and distributed affect which stories tend to be told and propagated under a capitalist system. He is influenced by the likes of Walter Rodney, Domenico Losurdo, and the Palestinian struggle in understanding the process of colonialism, its affect on contemporary political systems, and potential routes towards progress.

John is advised by Eimear Ryan for his novel and Heather Laird for his research.

Anna Gotsch

Anna Gotsch is a first-year PhD student in the School of English and Digital Humanities, working under the supervision of Dr Ken Rooney and Dr Miranda Corcoran.

Anna holds a BA in English Studies with a minor in German Studies from Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. In 2024, she completed the MA Texts and Contexts – Medieval to Renaissance at UCC with first-class honours.

Anna’s research project is an expansion of her MA research on a 2021 comic adaptation of the late 14th century Middle English romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. For her PhD, she aims to examine how contemporary adaptations approach and explore materialities, medialities and transmission histories of medieval works through the comics medium.

Alongside her studies, Anna currently works in Special Collections & Archives in Boole Library.

Jessica White

Jessica White is a PhD student in the School of English and Digital Humanities, under the supervision of Dr Joanna Wharton and Professor Claire Connolly. She holds a first-class honours BA in English from the University of York, and her PhD is funded by the Taighde Éireann – Research Ireland Pathways Programme. She also tutors in the English department at UCC.

Her research explores the intersections of children’s literature, political economy, and Enlightenment science in women’s writing in eighteenth-century and Romantic-era Britain and Ireland. Her doctoral dissertation focuses on prominent educationalists, including Maria Edgeworth, Anna Letitia Barbauld and Jane Marcet, considering the underacknowledged contributions of children’s writers to the development of economic theory, technology, and the discourse of improvement. This thesis involves close examination of philosophical and economic theories of happiness, tracing attempts to use children’s literature to increase individual and national happiness in the United Kingdom. 

Eleanor Elizabeth Lynch

Eleanor Lynch is a PhD student in the Department of English under the supervision of Dr. Sarah Bezan and Dr. Tom Birkett. She earned an MA in Medieval Studies from the University of Galway, and a BA in English from the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Her current research deals with attitudes toward the environment expressed in Old English riddles, elegies, and religious texts.

Hope Noonan Stoner

Originally from San Francisco, California, Hope Noonan Stoner is a doctoral student in the Department of English at University College Cork and an awardee of the Irish Research Council Postgraduate Scholarship. She holds an Honours BA in English and minors in Spanish and History from Union College, Schenectady, New York, a First-Class Honours MA degree in Irish Writing and Film from UCC and a First-Class Honours MA in Global Security and Borders from Queen’s University Belfast.

Her doctoral research focuses on the diasporic, transnational and postcolonial connections between modernist poets Lola Ridge and Julia de Burgos, from Ireland and Puerto Rico respectively. This doctoral dissertation uses the work of these two poets to argue for the existence of a transnational diasporic modernist poetic tradition and employs transnational feminist theory, postcolonial theory, translation theory and historiographical and modernist poetic lenses to explore the interconnected facets of Ridge’s and de Burgos’s poetry. 

Kieran Fionn Murphy

Kieran Fionn Murphy is a PhD student in the School of English and Humanities. His supervisors are Danny Denton and Dr Alan Gibbs. Kieran completed a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy at Connecticut College in the US and an MA in Creative Writing at UCC. He is working on a novel and researching illness narratives in contemporary fiction with a focus on Type 2 diabetes.

Mairéad Roche

Building on her MA in English from UCC focused on Bram Stoker's Dracula, Mairéad's PhD research considers the representation of female vampires both on the page and screen from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Mairéad’s thesis title is 'When monsters speak: exploring the societal preoccupation with the monstrous with particular focus on representations of the vampiric female in literature, television and film from the early nineteenth century to the present.'

Grainne Condon

Clodagh Troelstra Heffernan

Clodagh Troelstra Heffernan is a working-class scholar and an awardee of the Irish Research Council Postgraduate Scholarship. She completed a BA in English and History at Maynooth University in 2018. Following this, Clodagh spent two years working in precarious low-paid jobs and reading contemporary Irish literature in her spare time. This led her to University College Cork, where she achieved a First Class Honours MA in Irish Writing and Film in 2021. Upon completion of her MA, Clodagh began her PhD at UCC under the title Protest Writing and Dissent Culture in Contemporary Working-Class Ireland: Poetics of Defiance, supervised by Dr Heather Laird and Dr Adam Hanna.

Her PhD combines Gramscian Marxism with working-class autoethnographic reflections to illuminate the subversive aesthetic and conceptual qualities of the work of Irish writers who self-identify as working class. Clodagh’s work focuses on working-class Irish poetry, hip hop, crime fiction, and unpublished community writing from the neoliberal period in Ireland (1980 – present), examining the representation of working-class interactions with state forces such as the systems of social welfare, policing, education, and public arts funding bodies. Her research interests include working-class studies, the intersections between literary form and content, Irish social policy, genre fiction, traditional and alternative poetic forms, hip hop studies, Marxism, and cultural theories.

Dylan Phelan

Dylan Phelan is a PhD researcher in the school of English at UCC, supervised by Prof. Graham Allen and Dr. Miranda Corcoran. Dylan received an honours bachelor degree in English from the Waterford Institute of Technology in 2019. He received a Master’s degree in Modrnities: Literature, Theory and Culture from the Romantics to the Present from UCC in 2020. His MA thesis, “It’s a Shame She Won’t Live”: Posthuman Othering in Contemporary SF, examines the filmic portrayal of the posthuman subject in contemporary science fiction.

Dylan’s PhD thesis, The Posthuman Other and Capitalist Co-option, examines the influence of capitalist co-option on the problematic portrayal of the posthuman subject in science fiction. This thesis uses the posthuman theory of Donna Haraway and Rosi Braidotti to define the theoretical implications and radical liminality of the posthuman subject. Additionally, Dylan’s research takes a schizo-analytic approach to literary analysis, drawing from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to better account for the radical potential of the posthuman subject. Additionally, his research uses a post-Marxist lens in order to account for the influence of capitalist co-option in the posthuman’s filmic treatment. This approach relies on the critical theory of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer.

Éadaoin Regan

Éadaoin Regan is a final year PhD student in the School of English and Digital Humanities, UCC. The title of Éadaoin’s thesis is ‘A method to the madness?: Representations of psychological disorder in Irish women’s fiction 1870-1914’. Her research focuses on representations of madness in Irish womens fiction published during this period, and draws upon feminist psychoanalysis and postcolonial contexts. Éadaoin graduated with a BA Hons in English and History from UCC in 2012 and an MA in Literature from Ulster University in 2015.

In 2019, Éadaoin was the recipient of the CACSSS Travel Bursary which facilitated her attendance at a symposium in the University of Hertfordshire. This trip directly contributed to Éadaoin’s first academic publication. She has been a First Year Tutor in the Department of English since 2017 and has been a Senior Tutor in the UCC Skills Centre since 2019.

Holly Walker-Dunseith

Holly Walker-Dunseith is a PhD researcher at University College Cork, specialising in Irish literature and medical humanities. Holly holds an MA in Gaelic Literature, also from UCC, and worked as a teacher of English at secondary level and A level. Prior to Holly’s teaching career, she was awarded a BA(Hons) in English Language and Literature from the University of Leeds. The title of Holly’s PhD project is: Revival: Traditional Medicine in the Work of W. B. Yeats, Lady Augusta Gregory, and J. M. Synge. Holly can be found on Twitter: @HWalkerDunseith.

Laura Mulcahy

Laura Mulcahy has graduated with a BA in English (2014-2017) and an MA in Modernities: American & British Literature and Film (2017-2018). Since 2019, she has been working on her thesis, “Representations of Trauma in the Works of Stephen King”. This project aims to explore how trauma can successfully be explored through the horror genre and to dispute the idea that trauma can only be represented through highly experimental literature. She has been specifically researching the relationship between insidious trauma and misogyny, generational trauma and American history, and exploring trauma through fantastical landscapes.

Her research is conducted with reference to the works of theorists such as Judith Herman, Barbara Creed, Marianne Hirsch, and Tony Magistrale. Her main research interests include trauma theory, popular fiction, and Gothic horror.

Maria Butler

Maria Butler is a PhD candidate in the School of English and Digital Humanities under the supervision of Dr Clíona Ó Gallchoir and Dr James O'Sullivan.  She has a BA in English and French from UCC and an MLIS from UCD.

Maria's project Marian Keyes and the Irish Socio-Literary Landscape: A Critical Analysis using Close and Distant Reading is jointly funded by the Irish Research Council and the National Library of Ireland through the IRC Enterprise Partnership Scheme. The study is an interdisciplinary analysis of the work of popular Irish novelist, Marian Keyes, combining feminist literary-critical approaches and close textual analysis of Keyes’ writings with the materials present in The National Library of Ireland (NLI)’s Mystery of Mercy Close Digital Archive to examine the work and authorial persona of a commercially successful but critically neglected author. 

Ailish Kate Brassil

Ailish Kate Brassil is a PhD student in the School of English and Digital Humanities. Dr Miranda Corcoran and Dr Clíona Ó Gallchoir are her supervisors. Ailish completed her Masters in Children’s and Young Adult Literature in 2021 at Dublin City University. Her research is on girlhood fictions and domestic horror in Rebecca (1938), Carrie (1978), Matilda (1988) and Coraline (2002). Her focus is on the horror that takes place at home where there seems to be no escape. Ailish has three upcoming chapters in different edited collections. Her interests vary from horror, to children’s/YA literature and popular culture.  

Jennifer De Bie

Dr Jennifer deBie is a native Texan living in Ireland where she earned an MA in Creative Writing from University College Cork in 2017 and finished a PhD on Mary Shelley in 2021. She has been widely published with critical works appearing in anthologies by Raven Chronicles Press, PactPress, and Bloomsbury, something that neither impresses her cat nor pays her rent. Her first novel was published in 2020, her second is forthcoming from Wild Wolf Press. When not reading, writing, or teaching her seminar on plague literature, Jennifer enjoys typical millennial pastimes like eating brunch and neglecting her blog at jenniferdebie.com

Kevin Fylan

After a 25-year career as a journalist, Kevin Fylan resumed academic study to take an MLitt with Distinction in Viking Studies at the University of the Highlands and Islands. He is currently a PhD candidate in the School of English at University College Cork, researching the process of adaptation that has taken the Norse myths from the surviving eddic source material of 13th century Iceland to the films and TV series of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. His supervisors are Tom Birkett and Edel Semple. Alongside his doctoral research, Kevin is working on a project to translate the mythological poems of the Poetic Edda into rhyming English verse.