Karl O' Hanlon

My research focuses on modern and contemporary poetry. My monograph in progress Official Voices: Poets and the Irish State examines the dynamic between twentieth-century poetry and the emergence of an independent Irish state.

From August 2022, I will co-lead '"Our roots travel widely": Beyond Regionalism and Nationalism in Irish Poetry' (BRAN) with Dr Gail McConnell in Queen's University, Belfast. BRAN is funded by the Department of Taoiseach's Shared Island/North-South Initiative. I won the Faculty Early Career Research Achievement Award in 2022. In July 2022, I was awarded a Provost's Grant for Library Research to undertake archival work at the Z. Smith Reynolds Library, Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

My article 'Ferdinand Levy: A Harlem Renaissance Dubliner and De-Colonial Cosmopolitanism' is forthcoming in Journal of Modern Literature, and BBC Radio 4 have commissioned a show producer Claire Cunningham and I proposed on Levy's life and work, scheduled to air Autumn 2023.

 ‘The Case for Irish Modernism: Denis Devlin at the League of Nations and 1930s International Broadcasting’ appears in Modernism/modernity (Spring 2021). I have written for The Irish Times, Tribune, the Dublin Review of Books, and I review poetry widely. My writing on poetry has appeared in The Cambridge Quarterly, English, Études Anglaises, as well as several edited collections, including essays on Robert Lowell, John Berryman, and Geoffrey Hill. I recently contributed the Foreword to Martin Bell Translates Robert Desnos. I was previously contributing reviewer for the Modern Irish Poetry section of Year’s Work in English Studies, and I have peer-reviewed for several journals, including Irish University Review, Religion and Literature, and the publisher Peter Lang, as well as IRC postdoctoral fellowship internal peer review. I have given public readings, lectures, and talks at the Ilkley Festival, READ Salon (Durham), Trinity College Dublin, and This Irish American Life (NYU Glucksman House podcast). My poetry pamphlet And Now They Range was published by Guillemot Press in 2016 and reviewed in The Fortnightly Review and PN Review, and my poems have appeared in Agenda, Blackbox Manifold, The Hopkins Review, Poetry, and Stand. 

I teach across the module offerings in English at Maynooth, including at postgraduate level, and have convened several courses. I have supervised M.A. dissertations on H.D. and mysticism, Yeats and Irish translation, and Irish women's poetry and animality. With Dr Catherine Gander, I co-organise the Poetry and Poetics Reading series, and our readers have included Carolyn Forché, Ilya Kaminsky, Philip Metres, Ishion Hutchinson, Vahni Capildeo, and Seán Hewitt.

I welcome proposals for postgraduate work in any area of modern and contemporary poetry, particularly modernism, post-war U.S., British and Irish poetry, and poetry and theology. Before joining Maynooth, I was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Leeds. I held a Fulbright scholarship at Georgetown University, and I completed my doctorate at the University of York.