Welcome from Professor Claire Connolly
The School of English is ranked among the top 150 Universities for English in the QS World University Rankings 2012. One of the of the largest schools in the College of Arts, Celtic Studies and Social Sciences, English at Cork includes Drama and Theatre Studies, Film and Digital Arts and Humanities. Our staff includes 19 research-active academic staff (18 full-time and one part-time), post-doctoral research fellows, a School manager and 3 administrative staff, as well as over 40 MA students annually and nearly 50 PhD students. We are committed to providing excellent, research-led teaching to our undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as to enriching cultural and intellectual life, nationally and locally, through our research, publications and public engagement.
Some of our particular strengths include: Irish literature throughout the colonial period and into the twenty-first century; American literature, 19th to 21st centuries; Old English literature and culture; Modernisms (Irish, American and British); contemporary poetry, especially avant-garde and women’s work; new and emerging research methods (Digital Arts Humanities, e-textualities, the new book history); Medieval and Renaissance writing in Britain and Ireland, and Film: Irish, American and European.
The School is firmly embedded in local and regional culture and literature, as is evident from our widely-published research on Munster's rich traditions of fiction, poetry and theatre. Among the themes explored are Spenser and related writing about English colonial settlement in 1590s Cork, and Elizabeth Bowen and Molly Keane's interrogation of the Anglo-Irish gentry heritage. We also produce state-of-the-art research on such diverse topics as Afro-Caribbean poets, Gothic novels, eco-criticism, and the life of the dead in medieval literature.
We offer four successful, cutting-edge MA programmes - each grounded in current research and carefully planned and taught by an expert course team - in Modernities, Irish Writing and Film, American Literature and Film, and Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Contexts.
