Professor Richard Kirkland

Research Interests and PhD Supervision

My research is focused on the literature, culture, and politics of Ireland in the modern period of contemporary Northern Ireland, during the Irish Literary Revival of the early twentieth century, and in the context of the Irish in London. I have written four monographs and co-edited two collections of essays grouped around these areas.

I believe in the importance of comparative cultural analysis and so my work on Ireland has also led me to write on other areas of post-colonial literature and theory, as well as a wide variety of non-literary modes of cultural production such as film, television, news media, and popular culture. My latest book, Irish London: A Cultural History 1850–1916 was published by Bloomsbury in 2021.

My other work includes essays on post-conflict cinema in Northern Ireland, the DeLorean car for the Field Day Review, Gilles Deleuze and narratives of self-formation in the poetry of Medbh McGuckian, a reconsideration of the poetry of 1940's Northern Ireland, and the nineteenth-century phenomenon that was 'Dr Corry's National Diorama of Ireland'. I am a Fellow of the English Association.

I would be interested to hear from prospective research students working in areas related to twentieth and twenty-first century Irish culture.

Teaching

I teach across the modern period at King's including the following undergraduate modules: Introducing Literary Theories, 20th century Irish Literature, James Joyce and Ulysses, Modernist Poetry, Literature of World War One, Contemporary Irish Fiction. At MA level I teach a course on the Irish Literary Revival and a course on modern Northern Irish culture.