Conor McCarthy

An internationally recognised expert on the work of the critic and intellectual Edward Said, Conor edited a special issue of College Literature in 2013, 'Edward Said: Beginning Again', to mark the tenth anniversary of Said's death. He published a new anthology of the work of James Connolly, The Revolutionary and Anti-Imperialist Writings of James Connolly 1893-1916 in May 2016.  A volume of essays on academic freedom, edited with David Landy and Ronit Lentin and entitled Enforcing Silence: Academic Freedom, Palestine and the Critique of Israel, was published in May 2020.

Conor has recently published essays on Edward Said's self-invention as a radical humanist, and on James Connolly and empire.   A major essay on the concept of authority in Said's criticism appeared in Ariel in October 2020.  Essays on Said and globalization and on Irish anti-imperialist thought are in preparation.  Review-essays on Said and on Seamus Deane are in preparation for the Dublin Review of  Books and the Los Angeles Review of Books, respectively.

Conor’s research interests lie in the history of ideas and in Irish intellectual history, especially the history and politics of criticism and literary pedagogy. He is also interested in twentieth-century Irish culture, the history of Marxism, in postcolonial theory, and in the intersections of literature and political thought. He is currently planning a project concerning the intellectual legacy in Ireland of Edmund Burke.  Conor is also preparing a book for the radical French publisher La Fabrique, tentatively called Irlande: Un inventaire du present. Conor has supervised doctoral research in Irish modernism, theory, and the twentieth century Irish novel.  He welcomes doctoral research proposals in any of these or related areas.

Conor teaches across the range of the English curriculum.  Teaching he's most enjoyed lately has included a course introducing First Year students to the history of ideas.  More recently, Conor has been co-teaching a course on Romanticism, and a new third year seminar on the fictions of Joseph Conrad, a writer he's been passionate about since his teens, whose pertinence to our late modern world only increases with the years.   Conor also co-teaches a module on modernism, where he deals with Kafka and Woolf.

Conor also has taught courses in cultural theory at Second Year (BA) and MA level.  Having worked on a second year course on feminism a few years ago, where he concentrated on Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir, Conor more recently lectured on Western Marxism - the ideas of Gramsci, Brecht, Benjamin, Adorno and Jameson.  In the spring of 2020, Conor co-taught a Third Year module on 'Dissent and Revolution', where he concentrated on Maxim Gorky, Alexandra Kollontai and Mikhail Bulgakov as writers of the Russian Revolution of 1917.  With the addition of Yevgeny Zamiatin, this module will go ahead in Spring 2021.