Researcher in Contemporary Literature, Affect, Critical Theory

Writing

The Feminist Theory Archives at Brown University, July 2024

Most of my writing has focused on how contemporary literature treats the broken promises of upward social mobility in the age of late capitalism. I am also passionate about public engagement, and have written a number of pieces for popular audiences.

I’m also currently writing my first monograph, on which more here.

Academic Writing

Peer-reviewed articles

‘Generic Detachments in Contemporary Women’s (Art) Novels’, Textual Practice (2024). Online ahead of print. doi.org/10.1080/03087298.2024.2393542

(With Áine Mahon). “‘Go to Oxbridge, get an education, start a career. Do all the right things’: The ‘Low Value’ Arts Degree and the Neoliberal University”, Oxford Review of Education 50:3 (2024), 384-398 doi.org/10.1080/03054985.2023.2229550

‘The Celtic Phoenix, Capitalist Realism, and Contemporary Irish Women’s Novels’, Irish Studies Review 31:3 (2023), 348-362, doi.org/10.1080/09670882.2023.2233324

‘“Town’s Dead”: Contemporary Irish Popular Music and Dublin City.’ Popular Music and Society 46:3 (2023), 225-241, doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2023.2188629

(With Liam Harrison and Dearbhaile Houston), ‘Introduction: Women Writing Work.’ Irish Studies Review 31:1 (2023), 1-15, doi.org/10.1080/09670882.2023.2163742

‘Writing Work: A Conversation with Caitríona Lally.’ Irish Studies Review 31:1 (2023), 83-90, doi.org/10.1080/09670882.2023.2163737

‘“The moment you realise someone wants your body:” Neoliberalism, Mindfulness and Female Embodiment in Fleabag’. Feminist Media Studies 22:1 (2022), 132-147, doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2020.1797848

“‘Something as definitionally useless as art:” Contemporary Women Writers’ Künstlerromane and the Possibility of a Beautiful World.” Alluvium 10:2 (2022), doi.org/10.7766/alluvium.v10.2.03

‘“Systemic, transhistoric, institutionalized and legitimized antipathy:” Epistemic and Sexual Violence in Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-formed Thing and Anna Burns’s Milkman’. Contemporary Women’s Writing 15:3 (2021), 307-325, doi.org/10.1093/cwwrit/vpab033

‘“[The] immediate heft of bodily and civic catastrophe”: The body (politic) in crisis in Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones’. Irish Studies Review 29:3 (2021), 334-347, doi.org/10.1080/09670882.2021.1945758

(With Dearbhaile Houston), ‘Editorial: Twenty-first Century Irish Women’s Writing’. Alluvium Special Issue 9:1 (2021), doi.org/10.7766/alluvium.v9.1.01

‘“It was our great generational decision”: Capitalism, the Internet and Depersonalisation in some Millennial Irish Women’s Writing’. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 62:5 (2021), 538-551, doi.org/10.1080/00111619.2020.1835802

‘Storytelling and the Repeal of the 8th Amendment: Narrative and Reproductive Rights in Ireland.’ Rejoinder. Issue 5 (2020), Rutgers Institute for Research on Women.

‘“A lie that pandered to racism and xenophobia”: Brexit, White Teeth and (Inter)national borders.’ FORUM. 28 (2019), doi.org/10.2218/forum.28.3049

‘“A pre-natal hold”: Elizabeth Bowen, mothers and daughters.’ Estudios Irlandeses. 14:1 (2019), 28-40, doi.org/10.24162/EI2019-8784

Papers in Edited Volumes/Collections

‘“Talk about it, write it, spill it”: The Gothic and Contemporary Irish Women’s Essays’, in Haunted Hibernia: The Contemporary Irish Gothic, Sorcha Ní Flann and Simon Workman, eds.(Manchester: Manchester University Press), forthcoming 2026.

‘Sally Rooney‘, Commissioned entry for The Literary Encyclopedia, Aug. 2025.

‘“Just the Way it is”: Portraits of austerity in recent short fiction by women from the North of Ireland’, in Austerity and Irish Women’s Writing and Culture, 1980-2020, Deirdre Flynn and Ciara Murphy, eds. (London: Routledge, 2022), 207-223.

‘“Caught suddenly by the land shifting”: Ageing masculinity and rural Ireland in recent Irish short fiction’, in Ageing Masculinities in Irish Literature and Visual Culture, Michaela Schrage-Früh and Tony Tracy, eds. (London: Routledge, 2022), 151-165.

Review Essays

‘The Type of World We Want.’ On Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo. Review31. 25 Oct. 2024.

‘Literary / Capital: Dublin’. Dublin Review of Books. Issue 155 (June 2024).

‘Christian Moraru’s Flat Aesthetics (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023) and Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology (Penguin, 2018). C21: Journal of Twenty-First Century Writings 10:2 (2023), https://doi.org/10.16995/c21.10312

‘Review of Éoin Flannery, Form Affect and Debt in Post-Celtic Tiger Fiction (2022)’, Irish University Review 53:1 (2023), 199-202, doi.org/10.3366/iur.2023.0602

‘Review of Mary M. McGlynn, Broken Irelands: Literary Form in Post-Crash Irish Fiction (2022)’, Irish Studies Review 31:2 (2023), 321-323, doi.org/10.1080/09670882.2023.2194499

Special Issues

Irish Studies Review 31:1 (2023): ‘Twenty-First Century Irish Women’s Writing and Work’, with Liam Harrison and Dearbhaile Houston.

Alluvium 9:1 (2021): ‘Contemporary Irish Women’s Writing’, with Dearbhaile Houston.

Popular Writing

“Sally Rooney’s moral imagination was forged by an arts education. It’s a sector we can’t afford to neglect”. Opinion piece with Áine Mahon. Irish Times. 22 Oct. 2024.

‘Sally Rooney’s new novel, Intermezzo, is her longest and best consideration of “idiot desire and love” to date’. The Conversation. 24 Sept. 2024.

  • This article was also translated into Spanish by The Conversation: ‘La nueva novela de Sally Rooney ofrece su major reflexión sobre “el amor idiota” hasta la fecha’. 25 Sept.

‘Five Irish novelists to read while you wait for the new Sally Rooney novel, Intermezzo.’ The Conversation. 22 Aug. 2024.

‘Women’s Prize for Fiction 2024: Six Expert Reviews of the Shortlisted Books’. The Conversation. 4 Jun. 2024.

‘Problems of the PhD: Effectiveness, Forward Motion, and Impasse’. Thinkful.ie. 18 Apr. 2024.

‘Paul Lynch wins Booker Prize: why we’re in a “golden age” of Irish writing’. The Conversation. 23 Nov. 2023.

‘Beautiful World, Where Are You: A Literature Researcher’s Perspective on Mental Health in Academia.’ Thinkful.ie. 19 Jan. 2023.

‘Four of Shakespeare’s plays and how they speak to the current political situation in Britain.’ The Conversation. 26 Oct. 2022.

‘PartyGate Revisited: why Boris Johnson’s Downing Street is starting to sound like an Evelyn Waugh novel.’ The Conversation. 23 Feb. 2022.

‘“What do you do all day?” A case for the arts in the neoliberal university’. EU Commission, Shape-ID. 6 Jul. 2021.

‘Rewriting Joyce in contemporary Irish women’s short fiction’. The Modernist Review 28: Modernism in the Contemporary. 26 Feb. 2021.

‘The Unravelling of Old Uncertainties: Elizabeth Bowen and the Search for Stability in Times of Flux’. Irish Women’s Writing Network. 7 Dec. 2020.

‘Gender and the Pandemic: Crisis, Contagion and Caring’. Trinity Long Room Hub Arts & Humanities Research Institute. 29 Oct. 2020.

‘Identities in Transformation: The PhD Diaries’. Trinity Research. 11 Nov. 2020.

‘Contemporary Irish Literary Culture in Early Printed Books’. Tales of Mystery and Pagination. TCD Library Special Collections. 3 Oct. 2019.

‘Pockets and the fight for the female body’. Inciting Sparks. 3 Sept. 2019.