Dr Tom Walker B.A. (Oxford), M.Phil (Dublin), D.Phil (Oxford)
Ussher Assistant Professor in Irish Writing
Head of Senior Freshman
My research focuses primarily on twentieth-century Irish poetry. I wrote my doctoral thesis on the interconnections between the work of Louis MacNeice and the other Irish poetry of his time, and I am in the process of revising this for publication. I am also working on a long-term project investigating the relationship between the work of W. B. Yeats, the visual arts and the discourses of art writing. Other current interests include: mid-twentieth-century Irish periodical culture; the links between artistic circles in Dublin, Belfast and London in the same period; post-independence republican life-writing; idealist philosophy and the occult; and the work of Flann O’Brien and John McGahern.
This year at Trinity, my teaching includes a Senior Freshman option course on ‘Northern Irish Literature and the Troubles’, Sophister courses on ‘Art Writing’ and ‘Yeats and the Making of Modern Irish Poetry’, and a variety of seminars for the M.Phil in Irish Writing. I am also convening the Senior Freshman courses on D. H. Lawrence and Modernism.
Selected Publications:
‘Louis MacNeice among his Irish Contemporaries, 1939 and 1945’, The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry, ed. Fran Brearton and Alan Gillis (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2012)
‘MacNeice’s Byzantium: The Ghosts of Yeats and Eliot in The Burning Perch’, The Review of English Studies 62.257 (Nov. 2011).
‘Yeats’s MacNeice’, Irish Studies in Britain: New Perspectives on History and Literature, ed. Ellen McWilliams and Brian Griffin (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2010).
‘“Even a still life is alive”: Visual Art and Bloomsbury Aesthetics in the Early Poetry of Louis MacNeice’, The Cambridge Quarterly 38.3 (Sept. 2009).
‘Some Variant Dates of Composition for Louis MacNeice’s Poems’, Notes & Queries 56.3 (Sept. 2009).
‘Austin Clarke’, British Writers Supplement XV, ed. Jay Parini (Scribners, 2009).
‘The West of Ireland in John McGahern’s Amongst Women and Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy’, Beyond Philology 4 (2007).
Contact
Dr Tom Walker
School of English
Room 5016
Arts Building
Trinity College
Dublin 2
Tel: 00353 1 896 4353