Professor of English | Director of Wake Forest University Press

Contact

  • Office: C105 Tribble Hall
  • Phone: (336) 758-3365
  • Emailholdrij@wfu.edu

Degrees

  • PhD University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
  • MA University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
  • BA San Francisco State University, CA

Degrees

  • PhD University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
  • MA University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
  • BA San Francisco State University, CA

Areas of Interest

  • 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 Publications

Books

  • 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).
  • Book, 2022, Stepping Through Origins: Nature, Home, and Landscape in Irish Literature (Syracuse:
    2022)
  • Edited and introduced Post-Ireland? Essays on Contemporary Irish Poetry, with Brian O’Conchubhair
    (Winston-Salem, NC: Wake Forest University Press, 2017).

Essays

  • “The Autonomous Tear:  Conor O’Callaghan’s The Sun King and Caitíona O’Reilly’s Geis in 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 (Liverpool University Press, 2016).
  • Reprint in paperback 2015. “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).
  • “Face to Face with Clumsiness: Aberration, Errancy and W.B. Yeats,” Aberration in Modern and Contemporary Poetry, eds. Lucy Collins and Stephen Matterson (McFarland, 2011).
  • “Landscape and Family in the Eighteenth Century” Yeats in Context, ed. David Holdeman and Ben Levitas (Cambridge University Press, 2010).
  • “The Wolf Tree: Culture and Nature in Paula Meehan’s Dharmakaya and Painting Rain” An Sionnach: Special Issue on Paula Meehan, ed.  Jody Allen-Randolph (Volume 5: Spring/Fall 2010). 

Poetry

  • The Sound Thereof (Bradford, UK: Graft Poetry, 2017).
  • Devil’s Den and other poems (Ithaca: Split Oak Press, 2015).
  • Eruptions (Belfast: Lapwing Press, 2013).
  • The Wells of Venice (Eugene: Resource. 2020).
  • The Sound Thereof (Bradford, UK: Graft Poetry, 2017).

Journal

  • “Benchmark,” Voice in Italian-Americana, Vol. 29, No. 2 (2018).
  • “The Pot of Basil,”  The Tau: The Literary and Visual Art Journal of Lourdes University, 2018.
  • “Acqua Alta” Prairie Schooner, Summer 2018.
  • “Alla Bifora,” “Fragment of an Ode,” Watchung Review Volume 2 • July 2018
  •  “Doubting Thomas,” The Anglican Theological Review (99.4: Fall, 2017).
  •  “Against the Dawn,” Pomona Valley Review 11, Friday, July 28th, 2017.
  • “Irruptions,” Pomona Valley Review 11, Friday, July 28th, 2017.
  • Madonna Lactans,” “The Painter’s Riddle,” North of Oxford October 2017.
  • “Hands,” Poetry Wales, forthcoming.
  • “With Respect to the Nude,” Poetry Ireland Review, forthcoming.
  • “Human Frailty”, The Asheville Poetry Review, forthcoming.
  • “Harvest,” Sheepshead Review, Summer 2023
  • “Four Poems,” The Galway Review (https://thegalwayreview.com/2023/09/15/jefferson-holdridge-four-poems).
  • “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).

Articles

  • 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, forthcoming in 2024).
  • “Grief and Grievances:  Poetry and Politics in Robert Frost, in Literature and Aging (forthcoming).
  • “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 2024).
  • 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 the Angel in RISE (Review of Irish Studies in Europe, 4.2: 2022)

Additional Information