Dr Philip Coleman B.A. (NUI), M.Phil. (Dub), Ph.D. (Dub)

Academic Year 2012-13
In Michaelmas Term 2012 I will be teaching in Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, USA, as Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of English. In Hilary Term 2013 I will be on Study Leave.

Background
I first came to Trinity in 1995, having read for a BA in English and Philosophy in University College Cork. After completing an MPhil in Anglo-Irish Literature in TCD in 1996, I wrote a PhD thesis on the poetry of John Berryman, which I completed in 2001. My first academic appointments were in UCD as a Postdoctoral Fellow (2002) and in UCC as a Temporary Lecturer (2002-03). I was appointed to a Lectureship in English (Broad Curriculum) in Trinity in 2003. In 2006 I was appointed to a permanent lectureship in English Studies (Literature of the Americas), and in the academic year 2006-07 I was first Director of the MPhil in Literatures of the Americas program in Trinity.

In 2008 I was Visiting Associate Professor for a term in the Department of English at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, and in 2009 I was Visiting Professor in the English Department at the Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary. I have served on the editorial board of Metre magazine and I was executive editor of the official journal of the Irish Association for American Studies, IJASonline, for its first two issues (www.ijasonline.com). I have served on the Board of the Irish Association for American Studies and I am currently on the Board of the Irish Literature Exchange (www.ile.ie) and a member of the Committee for Literatures in English in the Royal Irish Academy (http://www.ria.ie/Our-Work/Committees/Committees-for-the-Humanities-and-Social-Sciences/Literatures-in-English.aspx). I am also a member of the Irish Fulbright Alumni Association.

Research
My research to date has focused mainly on US American poetry and short fiction, with a special focus on the work of John Berryman, about whom I have published several articles and co-edited an essay collection with Philip McGowan entitled ‘After thirty Falls’: New Essays on John Berryman (Rodopi, 2007). My book-length study of Berryman, entitled ‘The Scene of Disorder’: John Berryman and the Public Sphere, will be published by UCD Press in 2013, in time for the centenary of the poet’s birth in 2014. I have also published articles on several other US American poets, including Muriel Rukeyser, Carl Rakosi, and August Kleinzahler, as well as critical essays exploring the short fiction of William Austin, Edgar Allan Poe, George Saunders, Chuck Palahniuk, and David Foster Wallace. I have also published work on Chicana author Sandra Cisneros and Canadian short story writer Alice Munro.

I welcome the opportunity to supervise postgraduate research projects across the fields of modern and contemporary US American and Canadian poetry and fiction. Students have recently completed PhDs on David Foster Wallace, Delmore Schwartz, and representations of animality in American poetry under my supervision, and I am currently supervising dissertations on contemporary Asian American poetry, Ted Hughes’s engagements with American literature, the short fiction of Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut, and the poetics of e.e. cummings and Mina Loy. I am also supervising a PhD on Roberto Bolaño as part of Trinity’s PhD in Digital Humanities programme. I have an active interest in modern and contemporary British and Irish poetries in English, so I would also welcome inquiries from students interested in doing doctoral research in these fields, specially in transatlantic contexts.

Among my other recent publications are: ‘Forever Young?’ The Changing Images of America, co-edited with Stephen Matterson (Universitätsverlag, 2012); From Findrum to Fisterra: Reading Pearse Hutchinson, co-edited with Maria Johnston (Irish Academic Press, 2011); ‘On Verse Letters’ in A Companion to Poetic Genre, ed. Erik Martiny (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011). Previous edited works include On Literature and Science: Essays, Reflections, Provocations (Four Courts, 2007), and I am also a reviewer of contemporary poetry for publications including The Irish Times, Poetry Ireland Review, The Irish Left Review, Southword, and The Edinburgh Review.

Teaching
I have taught year-long and semester-long modules on many areas of U.S. American short fiction and poetry in TCD for almost a decade. For three years I also taught a year-long Sophister Option module called “American Letters,” in which instances of epistolarity in a wide range of texts are considered, from Christopher Columbus’s “Letter to Luis de Santangel” (1493) to J. Robert Lennon’s Mailman (2003). This module provides the basis for a book I am currently writing under the provisional title American Letters: Epistolarity and Self-Invention in the Literatures of the United States. I have also taught a one-semester module on the work of David Foster Wallace, and I have coordinated the Senior Freshman module “Introduction to Modernism.” I contribute to a number of other undergraduate modules, including “Other American Literatures” and “American Genres,” and I also teach on a variety of topics, from Inuit writing to New England regionalism, on the School’s MPhil in Literatures of the Americas, for which I also coordinate an option on the American Essay. I also contribute a seminar on Dante and modern American poetry to the MPhils in Comparative Literature/Translation Studies. Plans for future undergraduate teaching include modules on American essays and a one-semester module focussing on the modernist journal BLAST.

Contact
Dr Philip Coleman
Room 4020
Arts Building
Trinity College
Dublin 2
Telephone: +353-1-896 1907
e-mail: philip.coleman@tcd.ie

Links
RSS page: https://tcdlocalportal.tcd.ie/pls/webapps/cerif.cerif_cv.display_cv?p_cv_id=322 
Irish Association for American Studies: www.americanstudiesinireland.materdei.dcu.ie
European Association for American Studies: www.eaas.info

Selected Reviews
http://www.irishleftreview.org/2011/08/04/iron-railings-history-poetry-prose-kevin-higgins/
http://www.munsterlit.ie/Southword/Issues/22/odriscoll_harpur.html