Academic Work
I attended the Convent of Mercy Sacred Heart Secondary School in Clonakilty, Co. Cork -- I have written an appreciation of the Sacred Heart Education -- and later studied at University College Cork, the University of Constance, and the University of Bristol. My academic interests are in the fields of twentieth-century women's fiction, anti-colonial history and the aftershocks of colonial violence, intergenerational memory/postmemory, transgenerational trauma, ancestral guilt, literary responses to the pain of revolution and civil war, political violence and literary form, and migration and diasporic identity. I have written three academic books and co-edited three others with colleagues Bronwen Walter, Brian Griffin, and Tony Murray, in addition to publishing work in journals such as Irish Studies Review, Women: A Cultural Review, Women's Studies, Eire-Ireland, and contributing to a number of recent Cambridge University Press edited series, including the Cambridge History of Modern Irish Women's Literature. My academic research has been supported by a number of fellowships and awards, including a Fulbright Scholar Award (Fordham University, New York), an Arts and Humanities Research Council Fellowship, a John F. Kennedy Institute Visiting Fellowship (Free University of Berlin), a Moore Institute Visiting Fellowship (NUI Galway), and a British Library-Eccles Centre Visiting Fellowship in North American Studies. A list of academic publications can be found on my University of Exeter webpage.
Some of the 20th-21st Century writers I have enjoyed teaching and writing about most and carry closest to my heart include James Baldwin, Leland Bardwell, Samuel Beckett, Eavan Boland, Elizabeth Bowen, Maeve Binchy, Maeve Brennan, Raymond Carver, Quentin Crisp, Joan Didion, Anne Enright, Louise Erdrich, Martina Evans, Seamus Heaney, Maxine Hong Kingston, Jennifer Johnston, James Joyce, Patrick Kavanagh, Jamaica Kincaid, Joy Kogawa, Doris Lessing, Michael Longley, Mary McCarthy, Alice McDermott, John McGahern, Paula Meehan, Toni Morrison, Alice Munro, Edna O'Brien, Michael Ondaatje, Bernard O'Donoghue, Joan Riley, Arundhati Roy, William Trevor, Derek Walcott, Alice Walker, Virginia Woolf, and W.B. Yeats. Resting Places is an appeal to many of the writers and poets who have shaped my reading interests and my own writing efforts from my undergraduate years to the present day.
I have received a number of awards for teaching and as the first in my family to go to University have been committed to widening access to Higher Education and to teaching in community settings since the beginning of my academic career.
Life Magazine, May 1945
Courtesy of the Periodicals Collection at the New York Public Library
