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Researchers in English: Meet our Postgraduate Research Students

There is a thriving community of researchers in the Discipline of English at University of Galway. Staff, post-doctoral researchers, PhD and MLitt students come together to share ideas and spark projects and collaborations in seminars, workshops, and conferences, and the discipline has a highly successful track record of funding applications. Prospective researchers should in the first instance contact potential supervisors or mentors. Here you will find a list of department staff, including their contact details and research interests.
Our broad range of research interests is reflected in a wide variety of current and recent projects.
Our current postdoctoral researchers and PhD candidates are listed below:

Laura Ryan (Post-Doctoral Researcher)

Project Title: "Writing Homelessness: Down and Out in Modernist Literature"
Bio: Laura has research interests chiefly in literary modernism and African American literature. She completed her AHRC-funded PhD in 2019 at the University of Manchester, with a thesis entitled “‘You are white – yet a part of me’: D. H. Lawrence and the Harlem Renaissance”. A monograph based upon this thesis is in progress and Laura has so far published on various aspects of her work and interests in English Language Notes, Études Lawrenciennes, Resources for American Literary Study and The Modernist Review. Her current project at University of Galway, funded by an IRC Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship, explores how experiences of homelessness impacted upon the work of modernist writers and how conceptions of homelessness were formed and transformed in the modernist period.

John Carrigy

Project Title: ‘This Brytish Discovery and Recovery Enterprise’: John Dee and Elizabethan empire
Supervisor: Prof Daniel Carey

Tiana Fischer

Project Title: Revisionary aesthetics and mediation in the works of W. B. Yeats and James Joyce
Supervisor: Dr Adrian Paterson

Ciara Glasscott

Project Title: ‘Is childhood then so all-divine?’ Investigating representations of the child and pedagogical realism in the work of Anne Brontë
Supervisors: Dr Muireann O'Cinneide & Dr Justin Tonra

Esther Greenfield

Project Title: Dystopian Fiction and Environmental Activism
Supervisor: Dr Muireann O'Cinneide

Ciara Griffin

Project Title: Embodiment and identity in the literature of South Asian women writers
Supervisor: Dr Muireann O'Cinneide

Jessica Hannon

Project Title: Fairy tales making waves: adaptations in the wake of second and third wave feminism
Supervisor: Dr Lindsay Reid

Siobhán Kane

Project Title: Love and John McGahern
Supervisor Name: Dr John Kenny

Loraine Kavanagh

Project Title: The use of metaphor in academic writing by Chinese writers in an English-language academic environment
M.Litt Supervisors: Dr Frances McCormack & Dr Tony Hall (School of Education)

Ian Kennedy

Project Title: ‘The Life of a Nation’: Arts policy in Ireland 1948-1968
Supervisor: Prof Lionel Pilkington

Project Description: Focusing on case studies that deal with An Tóstal, the All-Ireland (Athlone), North Cork (Charleville), Clare (Scarriff) and Western (Tubbercurry) Drama Festivals, this research argues that amateur drama festivals, supported by the Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon, dynamically contributed to the paradigm shift that took place within post-war Irish society.

Bio: Ian Kennedy has worked in primary, secondary and higher education for over twenty years. A Doctoral Researcher at the Department of English, University of Galway, he is the Access to Post-Primary Teaching Project Co-ordinator and Academic Writing Tutor at St. Angela’s College, Sligo. His previous research included a cultural history of the Yeats International Summer School (2015) and a phenomenological approach to a Theology of Mission (2002). His current research examines the cultural impact of the amateur drama movement on the paradigm shift that took place in post-war Irish society.
Email: i.kennedy3@stangelas.nuigalway.ie

Ruairí Kennedy

Project Title: 'Disability as Subtext: A Study of the Elision of Disabled Subjects in Young Adult and Children’s Literature'
Supervisor: Dr Emily Ridge and Dr Lindsay Myers (Discipline of Italian)

Project Description: This project aims to explore the representation of subjects with disabled-adjacent characteristics in young adult and children's literature, and how this form of implicit representation of the disabled community may impact the reader's relationship with the text in a different way to that of a more typically explicit depiction. It strives to highlight both the virtues and the pitfalls of this form of representation in comparison to works that hinge around the explicit portrayal of a disability.

Bio: Ruairí Kennedy completed his BA in Ancient and Medieval History and Culture in Trinity College Dublin, where he developed an interest in the relationship between mythological tales from our past and more contemporary stories. He went on to graduate from an MA in Writing at University of Galway, where he solidified his bond with creative fiction, both as an outlet for his own personal projects as well as his research. He was drawn to his topic from both a mixture of his academic disciplines, as well as his own childhood, where he faced the various struggles that his disability presented him, and how they moulded his relationship with literature.
Email: r.kennedy18@universityofgalway.ie

Ioanna Kyvernitou

Project Title: Modelling women philosophers’ correspondence networks in seventeenth-century Europe
Supervisors: Prof Marie-Louise Coolahan and Prof Mathieu D'Aquin (Insight Centre for Data Analytics)

Des Lally

Project Title: The role of the Gate Theatre in Irish modernism, 1928-1945
Supervisor: Prof Patrick Lonergan (O'Donoghue Centre for Drama, Theatre & Performance)

Tomás Lally

Project Title: ‘To begin with’
Supervisor: Mr Mike McCormack & Prof Felix Ó Murchadha (Discipline of Philosophy)

Project Description: A practice based PhD in English and Philosophy.
1. A Philosophy thesis on the theme of beginning titled: How do ‘I’ begin? An exploration of the self as narrative construct arising in an intersubjective context.
2. A Novel on the theme of new beginnings exploring how received narratives define character and the possibility of deconstructing these narratives.

Bio: Tomás completed degrees in Philosophy in the 1980's, B.A (NUIM) and M.A, (University of London). He has returned to academia after an absence of 30 years and is combining his interest in philosophy with his interest in creative writing.
Email address: t.lally3@universityofgalway.ie

Holly Lavergne

Project Title: Poetic Immortality: Acts of Remembering in Early Modern Women’s Poetry
Supervisors: Prof Marie-Louise Coolahan and Prof Lukas Erne, University of Geneva

Andrew Levie

Project Title: he Faerie Queene and the ethnogenesis of Elizabeth I’s realm: Edmund Spenser’s poetic undermining of past tales in relation to his Tudor present
Supervisor: Dr Cliodhna Carney & Prof Michael Clarke (Discipline of Classics)

Project Description: This project analyses how Edmund Spenser’s epic-romance The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596) undermines narrative historicism and then contrarily engages in it. On one hand, it argues that Spenser tries to debunk the mystical vision that the sixteenth-century English were coming to have of themselves and their British-Trojan history. However, it then examines how Spenser manipulates past tales to express Ireland’s barbarity in an attempt to validate its need for colonisation.

Bio: Andrew Levie achieved his BA Connect in English and Classics with Creative Writing at University of Galway, where he fostered a research interest in the transmission of classical literature through the Middle Ages. He then pursued an MSc in Medieval Literatures and Cultures at the University of Edinburgh, where he focused on how medieval authors’ works manipulated the classics for their own contemporary means. This lead him to compose his master’s thesis on how Edmund Spenser subtly undermines the Tudor’s claimed Trojan ancestry in the epic-romance The Faerie Queene. Andrew is delighted to continue his research back at University of Galway, where his project is currently funded by the Hardiman Research Scholarship.
Email address: a.levie1@universityofgalway.ie

Brenda Luies

Project Title: Open Educational Resources (OER) in the History of the Book: Towards a New Anthology
Supervisors: Dr Lindsay Reid & Dr Catherin Emerson (Disicpline of French)

Paula Maher Martin

Project Title: "Studies in Growth": Femininity, Community and Reading in Interfeminist fictions of development 1920-1950; modernism; 20^th century
Supervisors: Dr Emily Ridge

Jane MacBride

Project Title: Liminality
Supervisors: Dr Cliodhna Carney & Dr Anne Karhio

Adam Matthews

Project Title: Freud’s Eros and Thanatos Theory when Confronted by the Face of Hauntology
Supervisors: Mr Mike McCormack & Dr Padraic Killeen

Nicholas Miller

Project Title:
Supervisors: Dr Frances McCormack

Pauline Murphy

Project Title: Spaces of Encounter in Irish inter-ethnic literature; 20^th century
Supervisors: Prof Lionel Pilkington & Dr Anne Karhio

Sara Nowak

Project Title: Redefining Belonging and Identity: First-Generation Immigrant Narratives and the Articulation of Displacement, Hybridity, and Cultural Complexity through Form
Supervisors: Ms Elaine Feeney & Dr Alexandra Peat

Tom O'Connell

Project Title: Representations of the Capital City in Irish and British Dystopia: A Comparative Study
Supervisors: Mr Mike McCormack & Dr John Kenny

Rónán O'Hanlon

Project Title: “The home of ancient idealism”: George Berkeley and the Origins and Influence of Irish Idealist Thought
Supervisors: Prof Daniel Carey

Alaz Okudan

Project Title: The Cultural and Artistic Implications of Perceived Accidents and Failures in Generative AI
Supervisors: Dr Padraic Killeen and Dr James McDermott (School of Computer Science)

Leah Palmer

Project Title: "Studies in Growth": Femininity, Community and Reading in Interfeminist fictions of development 1920-1950; modernism; 20^th century
Supervisors: Dr Eavan O Dochartaigh, Prof Daniel Carey, Prof David O'Shaughnessy

Rachel Parry

Project Title: Representing Difference: Danced Narratives of Intellectual Disability Experience
Supervisor: Dr Elizabeth Tilley

Dian Puspita

Project Title: Disaster events and news: Appraisal and evaluation in newspaper discourse and its representation in newspaper articles
Supervisor: Dr Andrew Ó Baoill

Ananya Rajoo

Project Title: Drifting, Contemplating and Creating in Hybrid Space: Rethinking the spatial, social and cultural dimensions of the lived experience by accounting for the fusion of physical and virtual spaces in everyday environments; 21^st century
Supervisors: Dr Justin Tonra, and co-supervision by El Putnam (Maynooth)

Mille Randall

Project Title: John Dryden and Late-17^th Century Miscellanies
Supervisors: Prof Erin McCarthy

Clare Robinson

Project Title: Diaspora and the Monstorous in Contemporary Horror
Supervisors: Dr Muireann O'Cinneide

Eoghan Ryan

Project Title: F.R. Higgins and the Irish poetry of his time
Supervisors: Dr Adrian Paterson & Prof Lionel Pilkington

Jennifer Scanlan

Project Title: The Construction of the Pagan Other in Old English Poetry
Supervisor: Dr Frances McCormack

Federica Sgaggio

Project Title: Translanguaging in the Creative Classroom: An Exploration of an Inclusive, Plurilingual Approach to Teaching and Learning
Supervisors: Dr Andrew Ó Baoill

María Sanabria-Barba

Project Title:
Supervisor: Dr Muireann O'Cinneide and Dr Nessa Cronin (Centre for Irish Studies)

Anna Sikora-Carelse

Project Title: Beyond Triffids: Change and Adaptation in the fiction of John Wyndham
Supervisor: Dr Elizabeth Tilley

Aris Siswanti

Project Title: Reading the Writings of Collaborative Women Writers: A Case Study in Indonesia
Supervisors: Kevin Davison (Education) and co-supervised by Dr Elizabeth Tilley

Madeline Stephens

Project Title: From Progression to Regression: The LGBTQIA+ experience in Irish and American Education and Literature
Supervisors: Sarah-Anne Buckley (History) and co-supervised by Dr Frances McCormack

Jane Tottenham

Project Title: The journal of Caroline Synge (1818-1862): a digital edition and study in life-writing
Supervisors: Dr Justin Tonra & Prof Sean Ryder

Hannah Ward

Project Title: The Perils of Being Seen: An Investigation into the Politics of Starvation in Ireland
Supervisors: Ms Elaine Feeney & Dr Emily Ridge

Leung Yan (Ian) Wong

Project Title: Promoting Open Educational Resources (OER) in Early Book Studies
Supervisors: Dr Lindsay Reid & Dr Catherine Emerson (Discipline of French)

Recent Research Graduates

Emily (Emma) Allen
The Power of a Letter: noble Irish women's use of rhetoric as a means of creating political agency and influence in petition letters to the Elizabethan state.

Alan Bergin
Masquerade, Self-invention and the Nation: Uncovering the Fiction of Katherine Cecil Thurston

Megan Buckley
"Midwives to Creativity": A Study of Salmon Publishing, 1981-2007

Evan Bourke
The Patroness of the Hartlib Circle: Women’s Authorship and Reception 1640-1665
See also the RECIRC project, funded by the European Research Council: www.recirc.nuigalway.ie

Aislaigh (Ashley) Cahillane
Writing Water Justice in the Twenty-First Century: Embodiment, Privatisation and Hydrofiction

Meaghan Connell
It's in the details the divil is: Corpus linguistics and Irish English literary dialect

Mark Corcoran
Nineteenth-century Irish fiction: Irish Identity, O'Connell and the Transnational

Maureen DeLeo
Mother Ireland in early 20^th century Irish literature—a Lacanian perspective

Eamon Doggett
The residue of inexpressibility in the fiction of Dermot Healy

Neassa Doherty
The Dublin Group: Irish Mezzotint Printmakers and the Dublin Print Trade c. 1740 to 1750

Ciaran Dowd
Upon Uncertain Ice: Contingency, Being and Witness in later Cormac McCarthy

Rebecca Downes
Becoming mortal: A study of death in late works by John Banville, Philip Roth and J. M. Coetzee

Lisa Fitzgerald
The Playboy and the Beauty Queen: Druid’s Role in Exporting the West

Gabrielle Fletcher
Dislocating reformist notions of the family in the work of Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein, and Edith Wharton

Rosemary Gallagher
Screamingly funny: A critical approach to the comedic anti-war novels of Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Tom Robbins and Tony Vigorito

Anna Gasperini
A Study of the Victorian Popular Periodical Publications known as Penny Bloods and Penny Dreadfuls

Patricia Holmes
Irish Travellers: an Exploration in Criticism and Fiction

Barry Houlihan
‘Not our line of territory’: A New Study of Social, Political, and Economic influence on Irish Theatre, 1957-1984

Colette Hughes
A carpenter of words: the poetry, engravings and are of David Jones

Kevin Hynes
Hiberno-English: Quo Vadis? : a Study of Four Evolving Phonemes in the Hiberno-English of Secondary-School Students in Galway City and County

Kristin Jones
Literature of the Unword: A Comparative Study of Samuel Beckett and Jack B. Yeats and Mary Swanzy

Ann Keady
Body and Soul: Turning Turk in Early Modern Barbary captivity narratives

Martin Keaveney
A Novel and an Essay on the Process of John McGahern’s 'The Dark’ (practice-based)

Edward Kearns
Measuring Moments: Annotating and Quantifying Narrative Time Disruptions in Modernist and Hypertext Fiction.

Nora King
Confession in Literature from Webster to Defoe

Carmel Lambert
The Shape of Africa: Liberia & Travel Writing

Christopher McCann
Revealing social hierarchy through literature and music

Conor Montague
Big Houses, Epistolary Relationships and the Irish Revival

Chanté Mouton Kinyon
Postcoloniality in the Irish and Harlem Renaissances

Mairéad Ní Chualáin
Taibhdhearc na Gaillimhe: Staging works derived from English and Hiberno-English (MLitt)

Eavan O’Dochartaigh
From Science to Sensation: A Study of Visual and Literary Representation in Scientific Exploration in the mid C19th

Ciara O’Dowd
The On and Off Stage Roles of Irish Abbey Theatre Actresses of the 1930s

Garret O’Malley
Stories of the Self: Narrative Strategies and the Boundaries of Self-definition in Context and Practice

Emily O’Flaherty
Patrons, Peers and Subscribers: the publication of Mary Barber’s Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1734)

Kathleen Pacious
The Ethics of Narrative Form: The Gentleman and the Socially Marginal in Gaskell, Dickens and Eliot

Mikyung Park
Gender and Ethnicity in Modern Irish Theatre: Martin McDonagh and Marina Carr

Siobhán Purcell
Deforming Disability in the works of James Joyce & Samuel Beckett

Elizabeth Quirke
“When They Talk About Mothers”: Investigating Queer Kinship in Contemporary Poetry

Paul Rooney
Readership and Non-Canonical Victorian Popular Fiction 1860-1900: Materiality, Textuality, and Narrative

Sean Scully
Teaching Richard III

Fionnula Simpson
Combating the stigmatisation of depression through an exploration of mental illness fiction and memoir

John Singleton
From The Dark to the Rising Sun: John McGahern and Irish Cultural Development from the Sixties to the Twenty-First Century

Emily Tock
‘On the Origin’: evolution, empire, and the self in Edward Lear

Brian Ward
1912: Cultural Expressions of Irishness in the Periodical Press

James Casey (with Huston Film School)
Disability, deficiency and excess: a critical re-examination of the construction, production and representations of physical disability in contemporary European film

Hilary Dully (with Huston Film School)
Documentarties on women's experience

Levi Hane (with Huston Film School)

Veronica Johnson (with Huston Film School)
The Representation and Narrative Function of a Character's Unconscious in the Films of Luis Bunuel, Alfred Hitchcock and Krzysztof Kieslowski

Francisco Jesús Rozano García (with Medieval Studies)
A Farewell to Elegy: Generic Redefinition of the Old English Text in the Early Medieval Literary Tradition

Mairéad Ní Chroinín (with the Centre for Drama, Theatre & Performance)
The Live Experience and Mobile Digital Theatre (Digital Arts and Humanities)

Mairead Casey (with Huston Film School)
'Playing Devil's Advocate: Cultural Expressions of Gender, Sexuality, and Sexual Violence in Possession and Exorcism Narratives of 21st-Century American Horror'

Andrea Ciribuco (with Italian)
Emanuel Carnevali: A Translated Italian in Modernist America

Siobhán Morrissey (with Italian)
Secondary worlds and liminal spaces: a study of Enid Blyton