Dr Darrell Jones B.A. (Oxford), M.St. (Oxford), Ph.D. (Dublin)Visiting Research Fellow
Research and Teaching Interests
I teach and research on a wide range of subjects in early modern and eighteenth-century literary and intellectual history. I completed my PhD on humanism and the early modern essay at Trinity in 2014. Since then, I have taught at Trinity, Queen’s University Belfast, and Maynooth University; held an IRC postdoctoral fellowship at NUI Galway; and published on the Anglo-Irish novelist and clergyman Laurence Sterne and the Irish scientist, philosopher, and politician William Molyneux. My second article on Sterne was selected as one of eleven essential modern critical perspectives in the Norton edition of his novel Tristram Shandy in 2018. I also organized an interdisciplinary conference on Molyneux’s life, work, and legacy at St Audoen’s church in Dublin in 2019. I am currently working on two projects that build on my previous research. One is a short study of the ethics of anonymity in the career of the literary critic Owen Ruffhead, who attacked Sterne’s morality in Ralph Griffiths’s Monthly Review in the 1760s. The other is a monograph entitled William Molyneux and the Irish Enlightenment, which uses Molyneux’s intellectual biography to recontextualize and reassess the concept of Enlightenment in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Irish Anglican culture.
Selected Publications
- ‘William Molyneux (1656-1698)’, in Richard Roche (ed.), Pioneers of Irish Neuroscience: A History of Brain Science in Ireland (Dublin: Neuroscience Ireland, 2022).
- Review of Amit S. Yahav, Feeling Time: Duration, the Novel, and Eighteenth-Century Sensibility, The Scriblerian, 55:1 (2022).
- ‘William Molyneux (1656-1698)’, in The Literary Encyclopedia, 1.2.4: Irish Writing and Culture, ed. Anne Markey and Ian Campbell Ross (2021).
- ‘The Molyneux Problem and Irish Enlightenment’, in Moyra Haslett (ed.), Irish Literature in Transition, 1700-1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 110-128.
- ‘Who was William Molyneux?’, RTÉ Brainstorm (November, 2019).
- ‘What can philosophy tell us about the fight over climate change?’, RTÉ Brainstorm (September, 2018).
- ‘Locke and Sterne: The History of a Critical Hobby-Horse’, The Shandean, 27 (2016), 83-111 [repr. in Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy: A Norton Critical Edition, ed. Judith Hawley (New York: Norton, 2018), pp. 541-553].
- ‘Locke on the Rocks: Coleridge at the Crown and Anchor Tavern’, Trinity College Dublin Journal of Postgraduate Research, 10 (2011), 162-168.
- ‘Difference and Representation in Locke and Sterne’, The Shandean, 21 (2010), 84-102.
Contact
Dr Darrell Jones
Arts Building
Trinity College
Dublin 2
E-mail: jonesd3@tcd.ie