English, Media and Creative Arts

Adrian Paterson has published widely on eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth century literature from birdsong to broadcasts, pianos to poems, with a particular interest in the artistic interactions and media of modernism and Irish literature. His research thus ranges from the present day to the eighteenth century, with a particular focus on sound technologies, music, art, poetry, and performance. Recent work, including articles on W.B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound, investigates music, the voice, and acoustics in the fin-de-siecle, prioritising the artistic inputs of Florence Farr and George Yeats; but also pursues instrument technology as far back as Goldsmith and eighteenth century stage and salon performance spaces. Exploring the individual conceptions and networked connections facilitated by print, orality, and media, from printed broadsides to radio broadcasts, his work opens up a broad field of intertextual, intermedial, and political relations. Ongoing research projects include Onus: The Weight of Words, uncovering how techniques of criticism and theory function in twentieth and twenty-first century all-media contexts; a fellowship Poets on Air at the University of Texas Harry Ransom Center and the IRC-funded Perfect Pitch: Music in Irish Poetry from Moore to Muldoon. 

Keywords: Modernism; fin de siècle and twentieth century literature; nineteenth century literature; literature and the arts, especially music; orality, print, performance, technology, including radio and instrument making; the works of W.B.Yeats, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, James Clarence Mangan, Thomas Moore, T.S.Eliot, Samuel Beckett, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, George Bernard Shaw.

Adrian Paterson teaches a wide variety of subjects from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries, from Swift and Sterne to contemporary poetry. Particular interests include modernist fiction, Irish poetry, and artistic interactions.