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Dr. Jefferson Holdridge

Professor of English | Director of Wake Forest University Press

Contact

  • Office: C105 Tribble Hall
  • Phone: (336) 758-3365
  • Email: 

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 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 the Angel 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).
  • Eruptions (Belfast: Lapwing Press, 2013).

Journals

  • “How I Wrote ‘Hands,’” Poetry Wales, Spring 2024. https://poetrywales.co.uk/jefferson-holdridge-how-i-wrote-hands/
  • “With Respect to the Nude,” Poetry Ireland Review, Fall 2024.
  • “Human Frailty”, The Asheville Poetry Review, Fall 2024.
  • “Harvest,” Sheepshead Review, Summer 2023
  • Four Poems: “Weeping Cherry,” “Humanity,” “Butterflies and Moths,”  “Compostable,” 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). 
  • “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.