Irish literature from Swift to contemporary period, with particular emphasis on W.B.Yeats, 20th-Century and Contemporary Irish Poetry
Late Victorian and Modernist poetry
Aesthetics
Courses Taught at Wake Forest
ENG 362/ 662- Irish Literature in the 20th Century
ENG 362/662- The Backgrounds of the Irish Literary Renaissance
WRI 111- Nature Writing
ENG 301/ 601- The Poetry, Prose and Drama of W.B. Yeats
ENG 301/601-The Drama of Samuel Beckett
ENG 301- Ideas in Literature; Travelers in Italy
ENG 301/ 601-The Poetry and Criticism of Seamus Heaney
MLS 738- The Sublime is Now
ENG 368/668- Irish Poetry of the 20th Century
ENG 768- Landscape in Irish Literature
ENG 300- Seminar in the Major: Twentieth-Century Irish Literature and Criticism
ENG 165- The Rhetoric of Morality
ENG 190- Epic and Lyric
ENG 150- Literature Interprets the World
FYS 100- Folklore and Mythology in Irish Literature
Selected Books
A Sterner Eye: W.B. Yeats and Religion (in planning stages).
Stepping Through Origins: Nature, Home and Landscape in Irish Literature (Syracuse UP, 2022).
Edited and introduced Post-Ireland? Essays on Contemporary Irish Poetry, with Brian O’Conchubhair (Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest University Press, 2017).
Edited and introduced The WFU Series of Irish Poetry 2 (Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest University Press, 2010).
The Poetry of Paul Muldoon (Dublin: Liffey Press, 2008).
Edited and introduced The WFU Series of Irish Poetry 1 (Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest University Press,2005).
Those Mingled Seas: The Poetry of W.B. Yeats, the Beautiful and the Sublime, (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2000).
Selected Essays
“Teaching Seamus Heaney’s Points of Departure in the Post-Ireland of Contemporary Irish Poetry,” Options for Teaching Irish Poetry in English (MLA: forthcoming Fall 2025).
“Grief and Grievances: Poetry and Politics in Robert Frost,” in Literature and Aging, editors Larry Mazzano and Sue Norton (forthcoming from Palgrave).
Co-written with Alexander Muller, “Still Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Epochal change in Twenty-First-century Irish Poetry,” Routledge Companion to Contemporary Irish Writing (Anne Fogarty and Eugene O’Brien, eds. (London: Routledge, 2025).
“The Struck Lyre Ripples as a Stricken Voice”: Derek Mahon’s Poetry, from Landscape to Ecology,” Contemporary Irish Poetry and the Climate Crisis, edited by Andrew Auge and Eugene O’Brien (London: Routledge, 2022). “A Roar of Wings: Faith, Scepticism, the Sublime in Medbh McGuckian’s The Book of theAngel in RISE (Review of Irish Studies in Europe, 4.2: 2022).
“The Autonomous Tear: Conor O’Callaghan’s The Sun King and Caitíona O’Reilly’s Geis,”Post-Ireland? Essays on Contemporary Irish Poetry, Jefferson Holdridge and Brian O’Conchubhair, eds. (Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest University Press, 2017).
“‘Halved Globe, Slowly Turning’: Editing Irish Poetry in America,” South Carolina Review 45: 1, (Fall 2012). Reprint in book form 2016.
“Bleeding from the ‘Torn Bough’: Challenging Nature in James Joyce’s Poems Penyeach,”The Poetry of James Joyce Reconsidered, ed. Marc Conner (University of Florida Press, 2012). Reprint in paperback 2015.
Selected Poetry Books & Journals
Poetry Books
The Wells of Venice (Eugene: Resource. 2020).
The Sound Thereof (Bradford, UK: Graft Poetry, 2017).
Devil’s Den and other poems (Ithaca: Split Oak Press, 2015).
“The Shared Risk, the Same Salvation,” Homage to Søren Kierkegaard: Poems in Memory of Reverend Ronald Marshall Ed. Dana Goia (Wiseblood: Menomonmee Falls, WI, 2023)
“Flora and Hypatia” the quint: an interdisciplinary quarterly from the north, 14.3 (June 2022).
“Painting and Star,” “Sfumato,” “Sturm und Drang,” “The Ballad of Spike and Seed,” “The Disrupter,” “The Point of Flight or Fire,” the quint:: an interdisciplinary quarterly from the north, 13.2 (March 2021). “Rafts” Mantis: A Journal of Poetry, Criticism and Translation, Stanford University, 2021.
