News

We are delighted to announce the publication of Women's Poetry from Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, 1400–1800: An Anthology, co-authored by Professor Marie-Louise Coolahan.

Anthologies play an essential role in shaping literary history. This anthology reveals women's poetic activity and production across the three nations of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales from 1400 to 1800, overturning the long-standing and widespread bias in favour of English writers that has historically shaped both scholarly and popular understanding of this period's female poetic canon. Prioritising texts that have never before been published or translated, readers are introduced to an extraordinary array of women's voices. From countesses to servant maids, from erotic verse to religious poetry, women's immense poetic output across four centuries, multiple vernaculars, and national traditions is richly demonstrated. Featuring translations and glosses of texts in Irish, Ulster Scots, Scots, Scottish Gaelic, and Welsh, alongside informative headnotes on each poet, this collection makes the work of women poets available like never before. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core at https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/womens-poetry-from-ireland-scotland-and-wales-14001800-an-anthology/E93CA16B03E3CBA35C276E7908383E82

Dr Andrew Ó Baoill has co-authored Community Media, Sustainability and Crisis: Lessons from Covid and Beyond, which examines how community media responds when existing structures and normal expectations are upended, across a global set of perspectives. This original collection draws on a truly global set of perspectives, with authors from Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas, who explore a range of ideological, political, economic, and cultural factors that shape how community media projects respond to crises. Contributors analyze how to evaluate the sustainability and operation of community media, using case studies centered on community radio station responses from across a range of geographical settings during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through broadening focus to discuss community radio with other forms of crisis such as communities rebuilding after earthquakes and natural disasters, the authors describe how community media can be an important resource for community resilience and recovery.

Huge congratulations to Sarah Maria Griffin, graduate of our MA in Writing programme 2010-11.

Weidenfeld & Nicolson (W&N) has acquired world rights to Sarah's new novel, Everything Not Saved, and a second title, with publication for the first novel scheduled for spring 2028. Described as a "wildly original" multi-layered mystery about grief and video games, this deal marks a major, high-value, two-book acquisition.

Sarah is the author of Eat the Ones You Love (2025), Spare and Found Parts (2016) and Irish Book Award-winning YA novel Other Words for Smoke (2019).

Click here to read news from Bryony Woods Literary Agency.

Congratulations to MA in Writing 2016-17 graduate Shannon Kuta Kelly whose debut collection of poetry The Tree Is Missing will be published by Faber on the 23rd April 2026.

In The Tree Is Missing, Shannon Kuta Kelly explores the poetics of the border. The collection crosses through non-places, moving between the unnamed and unmapped spaces on the edges of the European city. With remarkable poise and restraint, these itinerant poems experiment with oral history and translation, traversing the borderlines of nation, language and time. They draw on folklore to evoke a world that feels immediate but can now only be reached through storytelling. In doing so, Kuta Kelly explores the loss and displacement – the fracture of identity – necessitated by personal and political turmoil. She writes with a restless immediacy while evoking the histories that continue to shape us.

Link to Faber Publishers

Massive congratulations to our wonderful colleague Elaine Feeney who was named Library Association of Ireland Author of the Year at the An Post Book Awards last nightElaine's novel Let Me Go Mad In My Own Way was also shortlisted for the An Post Irish Book Awards Eason Novel of the Year.
https://www.irishbookawards.ie/winner/elaine-feeney/
Elaine lectures on our undergraduate Creative Writing programme.

Our colleague John Patrick McHugh's debut novel, Fun and Games, was shortlisted for the An Post Novel of the Year. John Patrick is a graduate of our BA Creative Writing programme, formerly our Irish Arts Council Writer in Residence (2024), and this year he is teaching a second-year Creative Writing seminar on our English joint honours programme as well as acting as mentor for one of our BA English & Creative Writing 3rd year Independent Projects pods.

Congratulations to Mei-Ling Staunton, who was awarded the Dr Henry Hutchinson Stewart Literary Prize in English, at a recent ceremony in the RDS.
The award is based on the highest results in assessments completed in first year, and Mei-Ling was nominated by the department.
She is currently in the second year of our BA English & Creative Writing programme.

Dr Frances McCormack narrates "Nowthen," a short film made about Finnegans Wake 85, to commemorate the 85^th anniversary of the publication of Finnegans Wake. Frances researches on the emotions and the senses in this notoriously difficult text.#

Click https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvTIiaby62Q

Teaching and research are both central to the role of academic staff, and excellence in teaching and in creative and scholarly work go hand in hand. The President’s Awards for Teaching Excellence recognise the outstanding efforts of teaching staff to ensure University of Galway students receive the highest quality learning experience.

The Discipline of English has an excellent track record of engaged and innovative teaching: 4 staff have been awarded President's Teaching Awards since 2005 (of a total of 50 awards across the University): 

Dr Muireann O'Cinneide: 2015 
Dr Rebecca Barr: 2013
Dr Frances McCormack: 2010
Dr Ros Dixon: 2007

Dr Justin Tonra has been awarded an Irish Research Council New Foundations grant for his project Poetry Machines: Technologies of Poetic Composition. New Foundations supports researchers to pursue research, networking and dissemination activities within and between all disciplines. It provides seed funding for small-scale research actions; the development of networks, consortia and workshops; and creative approaches to the communication of scientific concepts or complex societal challenges for a lay audience. Dr Tonra’s award was one of thirteen funded under the STEAM strand, which aims to bring science and art, design and the humanities together to work on new ways of communicating scientific concepts and complex societal challenges for a lay audience.

Project summary: Poetry has a long and fascinating relationship with technology that bridges the apparent gap between the humanities and sciences. The printing press, the typewriter, and the tape recorder have each offered radical new formal possibilities to poets, while the digital age has yielded computational methods for generating verse that challenge our basic understandings of the creative process. Poetry Machines is a project which will survey the long history of poetry machines, and communicate the neglected story of how the precepts of science, engineering, and mathematics, have been used to make and shape poetry.

 See http://research.ie/what-we-do/loveirishresearch/blog/irish-research-council-announces-100-new-awards-to-support-research-collaboration-and-dissemination/ for details.

Dr Justin Tonra’s research into the social network structures of Ossian is now a short film! https://youtu.be/TUUeETqGMlE

Working with collaborators at Coventry and Oxford Universities, Dr Tonra’s research demonstrated that the underlying network structures of James Macpherson’s Ossian poems are less similar to the Homeric epics (a parallel which Macpherson attempted to emphasise) than to the literature of the Irish Fenian Cycle (whose influence Macpherson disavowed).

Read the original research at https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S0219525916500089 [subscription];
 https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.00142 [open access].