Dr Brendan O’Connell B.A. (Dublin), Ph.D. (Dublin)
Assistant Professor (Ussher Lecturer in Medieval Literature)
Director of Visiting Students (Outgoing)
Appointed to the School in 2006, Brendan O’Connell teaches Medieval Literature, in particular the poetry of the fourteenth- and fifteenth-centuries. At Freshman level, he is the course co-ordinator for The Gods in Literature, Medieval and Renaissance Romance and Fables. He also teaches on Beginnings of English Poetry and offers a Senior Freshman option, Comedy and Carnival in Medieval and Renaissance Literature. At Sophister level, he teaches the year-long Chaucer option and a one-semester course on the Gawain-poet. In addition to teaching within the School, he contributes to the MPhil in Medieval Language, Literature and Culture at the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. He is also a College tutor.
Dr O’Connell’s research interests lie primarily in the works of Chaucer and the Gawain-poet, and in the areas of medieval poetics, dream-vision and romance. His doctoral thesis considered Chaucerian poetics from an ethical perspective, arguing that the poet was influenced by a literary tradition (incorporating writers such as Jean de Meun and Dante) that developed a theory and vocabulary of artistic representation by drawing on the complex moral and legal discourse surrounding fraud and falsification. He is currently preparing this thesis for publication, and has a number of forthcoming publications on Chaucer and other aspects of medieval literature. In addition to these subjects, he has an ongoing fascination with metamorphosis and transformation, and has presented conference papers on such subjects as shape-shifting and alchemy. He regularly participates in the Leeds International Medieval Congress and other conferences, and is a member of the New Chaucer Society.
Recent and Forthcoming Publications:
Books:
The Old Ways and the New: Essays on Medieval and Renaissance Literature in Honour of John Scattergood, ed. Karen Hodder, Brendan O’Connell and Amanda Piesse (forthcoming).
Articles:
‘The Poetics of Fraud: Jean de Meun, Dante and Chaucer’, in Chaucer in Context: A Golden Age of English Poetry, ed. Gerald Morgan, forthcoming (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2012)
‘“Questions never put before”: Culture and Dispute in Dialogus de Scaccario’, in The Old Ways and the New: Essays on Medieval and Renaissance Literature in Honour of John Scattergood, ed. Karen Hodder, Brendan O’Connell and Amanda Piesse (forthcoming).
‘“Ignotum per ignocius”: Alchemy, Analogy and Poetics in Fragment VIII of The Canterbury Tales’, in Transmission and Transformation in the Middle Ages: Texts and Contexts, ed. Kathy Cawsey and Jason Harris (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007), pp. 131-56.
‘Adam Scriveyn and the Falsifiers of Dante’s Inferno: A New Interpretation of Chaucer's Wordes’, Chaucer Review 40.1 (2005): 39-56.
Contact Details:
Dr Brendan O’Connell
School of English
Trinity College
University of Dublin
Dublin 2
Ireland
Office: Room 3160
Tel: + 353 1 896 2597.
Fax: + 353 1 671 7114.
e-mail: oconneb2@tcd.ie.
Links:
MPhil in Medieval Language, Literature and Culture:
http://www.tcd.ie/langs-lits-cultures/postgraduate/medieval_language/Resources.php