Fran Brearton

My research interests are primarily in Irish and British poetry of the 20th and 21st centuries, and in the literature and culture of the First World War, literary modernism, war writing through the 20th century, and poetry and the environment. I have particular interests in the work of W.B. Yeats and Robert Graves, as well as in contemporary Northern Irish poetry.

My first monograph was a study of the effects of the First World War on 20th-century Irish poetry (The Great War in Irish Poetry, OUP); my second, a study of contemporary Northern Irish poet Michael Longley in context (Reading Michael Longley, Bloodaxe). I am co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry; Incorrigibly Plural: Louis MacNeice and his Legacy (Carcanet); and Modern Irish and Scottish Poetry (Cambridge UP). I edited a WWI centenary edition of Robert Graves's memoir Goodbye to All That (Penguin), and am currently working on a study of poetry and body modification.

I convene and teach on the MA in Poetry, in the areas of poetry and war, poetry and the environment, love poetry, Irish poetry. I have supervised c.20 PhDs in areas including modern Irish literature; modern English fiction; Irish and American poetry; Irish and British poetry; the poetry of W.B. Yeats; poetry and the media; Literature of the 1930s; Irish women's poetry. I also supervise the critical component of creative writing PhDs in poetry and prose.