Dr Nicholas Taylor-Collins

Overview

I joined Cardiff Metropolitan University in September 2019, having spent two years as a lecturer at Swansea University. I previously taught at the University of Warwick, where I was also a postdoctoral associate fellow. I completed my BA (Hons) at the University of Warwick, my MA at The University of Manchester (funded by the AHRC) and my PhD back at Warwick. My thesis, completed in 2015, examined the interconnections between the emergence of ‘English’ literature in and through Shakespeare’s drama—among other early modern writers—and the emergence of modern Irish literature in the twentieth century.

My monograph, Shakespeare, memory and modern Irish literature (Manchester University Press, 2022) builds on the thesis but narrows the focus to a particularly disruptive strain of memory (‘dismemory’) that conditions the connection between Shakespeare and twentieth-century Irish writers. Alongside Dr Stanley van der Ziel, I co-edited Shakespeare and Contemporary Irish Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) in which collected essays from esteemed academics across to Europe explored the Shakespeare-Irish literature connection. On the same topic, I have published articles in Irish Studies Review, Cahiers Elisabéthains, Notes and Queries and Modern Language Review.

I am now examining the representation of death in the fiction of Irish novelist John Banville. In 2018 I won a Santander Mobility Grant to travel to the W.B. Yeats Chair at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, where I delivered a lecture on the topic of ageing in Banville’s fiction. This will be the first chapter of my next book, and an early version has been published in a special issue of the Brazilian Journal of Irish Studies (ABEI) on the topic of John Banville which I co-edited with Professor Laura Zuntini de Izarra and Professor Hedwig Schwall (2020). I am currently co-editing John Banville in Context (Cambridge UP) with Dr Bryan Radley (York).

In 2019 I won an Outstanding Contribution to Employability Award and an award for the Best New Module at Swansea University. Both were awarded for my work designing and convening the International Dylan Thomas Prize module at Swansea University.

I am currently supervising doctorates on Shakespeare and the offstage, the coeval development of songs alongside poetry, and on post-1997 children’s fantasy literature. I am interested in supervising PhD topics in any of my research specialisms, and more widely on modern/contemporary Irish writing and/or literary and cultural theory.

For more information, follow me on Twitter @n_taylorcollins, and check out my Wakelet portfolio.

Research Publications

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