BA, PhD (Dublin)

My principal research interests lie in the fields of Irish literary and cultural studies, most particularly drama and fiction of working-class experience. I published my first monograph, Writing Ireland’s Working Class: Dublin After O’Casey, with Palgrave Macmillan in 2011, and my work includes research on Seán O’Casey, Brendan Behan and Dermot Bolger, and generally on cultural representations of class in Irish life. I have almost a decade’s experience of teaching Communications and English in further education in Dublin and I am a former newspaper editor with Belfast Media Group.

My fellowship with the Institute for Collaborative in the Humanities at Queen’s focuses on representations of the lives of working-class people in the North of Ireland throughout the twentieth century. It aims to explore the class politics of everyday life  through its manifestation in various forms of cultural production — such as poetry, drama, fiction, song, memoir and film.

If class is, as Lawrence Driscoll recently put it, "a troubling subterranean and repressed element in contemporary literature, theory, and culture", this fellowship aims to address this concern, in a Northern Irish context, through the scholarly excavation and analysis of neglected artefacts of working-class life.

In doing so, my research aims to address the Institute’s central theme for 2013, Thinking Forward through the Past, by unearthing submerged narratives and discourses of Northern Irish life that will enhance our understanding of class and culture – and communities’ understanding of each other – into the future.  The central assumption of this research was perhaps best articulated in Peter McNamee and Tom Lovett’s study Working Class Community in Northern Ireland (1987), when they asserted the vital role of understanding class issues in contributing to a shared vision of the future: “If community relations work is to make a significant contribution in terms of helping to end the causes of the conflict in Northern Ireland, then it must recognise and build upon this living common [working-class] culture which cuts across the sectarian divide […] there are more than simply two traditions in the province […] we would posit the view that there is a long and honourable tradition on our own doorstep imbued with a rigorous understanding of sharing and sameness.”  

That sharing and sameness is represented in myriad social and cultural forms, and this fellowship therefore presents many opportunities for collaboration and mutual enrichment across humanities disciplines. My role within the Institute will be to organise conferences and a number of inter-disciplinary research projects on this topic, along with the foundation of an inter-institutional network on working-class culture in Northern Ireland, crossing disciplines, institutions and communities; as well as being an academic/public forum, this will liaise with community groups, libraries and other stakeholders. It is also hoped that this work can assist in the development of a library/archive of working-class life and a website that will host discussion and debate on working class history and culture.  Key themes of my fellowship will include: social interventions in community theatre, labour radicalism, diaspora stories, war and the working class, women and class in Northern Ireland, and class and conflict in Irish life.

My fellowship offers significant prospects for engagement with the community and stakeholders in uncovering and celebrating stories of working-class life, through public engagement, academic collaboration and social history research.  As we approach key centenaries of major events in the history of working-class Ireland – the 1913 Lockout, the First World War, the 1914 activities of Belfast suffragette militants and the Easter Rising of 1916 – the time is ripe for a fresh engagement with working-class history and culture.  And if the legendary working-class Belfast writer Thomas Carnduff could claim that “the University and the worker have little in common” and that Queen’s was “an educational institution reserved to certain classes of the community”, the aim of this research fellowship is to break down such barriers between scholarship and social engagement.