Dr Karl O' Hanlon

Biography
I am a poet-critic, and my research focuses on modern and contemporary poetry.
My monograph, Official Voices: Poets and the Irish State, is forthcoming with Liverpool University Press in 2024. It examines the poet-politicians and bureaucrats who shaped the twenty-six county Irish state. It focuses on how major issues in the state’s history resonate in the work of these poet-officials: revolution, state violence/insurgency against the state, patriarchy, partition, modernisation, socialist and feminist alternatives to conservative nationalism. Poets examined in this book include W.B. Yeats, Desmond FitzGerald, Denis Devlin, Valentin Iremonger, Máire Mhac an tSaoi, Eithne Strong, and Thomas Kinsella.
I am PI on the North-South Research Programme project '"Our roots travel widely": Beyond Regionalism and Nationalism in Irish Poetry' (BRAN). Funded by Department of the Taoiseach's Shared Island Unit, the project is a collaboration with Dr Gail McConnell in Queen's University, Belfast, and brings postdoctoral researcher Dr Julie Morrissy to Maynooth. In March 2023, We launched the project with a symposium in the Museum of Literature, Ireland, and our dissemination activities include a digital exhibition, creative-critical anthology, and poetry jukebox instalments. A final symposium will take place at the Linen Hall Library, Belfast in June 2024.
In October 2023, I undertook research on mid-century migrant poetry in Ireland at the Library of Congress with the support of an RIA Charlemont Grant, and I was invited to give a talk on my research at Georgetown University.
In 2022, I won the Faculty Early Career Research Achievement Award. 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 in April 2023.
A current focus of my research on mid-century migrant writers is Jamaican poet Ferdinand Levy (possibly the first black poet published in Ireland). My article 'Ferdinand Levy: A Harlem Renaissance Dubliner and De-Colonial Cosmopolitanism', forthcoming in Journal of Modern Literature (spring 2024). BBC Radio 4 have commissioned Ferdy, a show producer Claire Cunningham and I proposed on Levy's life and work, scheduled to air spring 2024 with poet Jason Allen-Paisant as presenter.
My article ‘The Case for Irish Modernism: Denis Devlin at the League of Nations and 1930s International Broadcasting’ appeared in Modernism/modernity (Spring 2021). I have been invited to speak at Cambridge University's Postcolonial Seminar and the Trinity College Dublin Contemporary History Seminar, and recent conference presentations include Irish Literature and Periodical Culture (Leuven, December 2022), Irish Writers of the 1930s (Almería, March 2023), and Unions and Partitions in Ireland (EFACIS, QUB, August 2023).
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.
With Dr Jonathan Foster (Stockholm) and Dr Elliott Mills (Trinity College Dublin), I am co-editing Irish Writers and State Bureaucracy, forthcoming with Liverpool University Press in 2025.
I 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 am finalising my first collection of poetry. In 2023, I was shortlisted for the Eavan Boland Emerging Poet Award. My poem 'Eliza', an elegy for my great-aunt murdered in the Belfast pogrom 1922, was included in the Poetry Jukebox installation as part of the Poetry as Commemoration (UCD) project in May 2023. 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/are forthcoming in Agenda, Blackbox Manifold, The Hopkins Review, The Irish Times, Poetry, and Stand.
I contribute to the administrative life of the university as Faculty Research Committee Secretary, and with Dr Kevin Tracey and Dr Féaron Cassidy, co-founded Maynooth's ECR/Postdoctoral Network. From 2019-2022, I was Dissertations Co-Ordinator (Research). In 2021, I served as acting Research Co-Ordinator.
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, as well as a creative prose M.A. dissertation. 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. On my third year elective, Contemporary Poetry, we study poets from Ireland, the U.K., the U.S., Trinidad, Palestine, Jamaica, and elsewhere. My teaching on this and other modules includes 'creative' components. My offering on our MA Literatures of Engagement, Poetry and the Irish State, includes an archival masterclass in the Pearse Hutchinson papers housed in Maynooth's Special Collections. In Spring 2023, I sponsored an AHI/Library Fellowship held by poet Kimberly Campanello, who produced work responding to the Hutchinson archive. I've recently worked with colleagues in Special Collections to secure donation of the Tom O'Brien papers, an important literary archive relating to mid-century socialism and the Spanish Civil War.
I welcome proposals for postgraduate work in any area of modern and contemporary poetry, particularly modernism, 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. I completed my BA Honours degree in English at Queen's University Belfast, where I won the Esther Ballantine Prize on graduation. I am the first in my immediate and extended family to reach third-level education, and I champion widening access.
Research Interests
Peer Reviewed Journal
Year | Publication | |
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2023 | Karl O'Hanlon (2023) 'Ferdinand Levy: A Harlem Renaissance Dubliner and De-Colonial Cosmopolitanism'. Journal of Modern Literature, . | |
2021 | O'Hanlon K. (2021) 'The case for Irish Modernism: Denis Devlin at the league of nations and 1930s international broadcasting'. Modernism/Modernity, :157-180. [DOI] [Full-Text] | |
2018 | Karl O'Hanlon (2018) ''A Final Clarifying: Form, Error, and Alchemy in Geoffrey Hill's Ludo and the Daybooks''. Etudes Anglaises, . [DOI] [Full-Text] | |
2016 | O'Hanlon K. (2016) ''The violent and formal dancers': John Berryman and Geoffrey hill'. Cambridge Quarterly, 45 (3):208-223. [DOI] [Full-Text] | |
2016 | O'Hanlon K. (2016) ''Noble in his grandiose confusions': Yeats and Coriolanus in the poetry of Geoffrey Hill'. English, 65 (250):211-233. [DOI] [Full-Text] |
Book Chapter
Year | Publication | |
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2020 | Karl O'Hanlon (2020) 'Rebels in Formal Dress: Robert Lowell, Denis Devlin and their Transatlantic Literary Network' In: Robert Lowell and Irish Poetry. Bern: Switzerland : Peter Lang. | |
2017 | O'Hanlon K. (2017) ''A fresh, active relation': Milton's Lycidas and the poetry of John Berryman' In: John Berryman: Centenary Essays. [DOI] | |
2016 | O’Hanlon K. (2016) 'Language and the fall in W. B. Yeats and Geoffrey Hill' In: Fall Narratives: An Interdisciplinary Perspective. [DOI] | |
2014 | Karl O'Hanlon (2014) ''Antimodernism and Religious Modernity in Brighton Rock: The Divided Mind of Graham Greene’' In: Graham Greene: un écrivain dans le siècle [actes du colloque international réunion à Besançon, 10-11 décembre 2011). Besançon : Presses de l'université de Franche-Comté. |
Other Journal
Year | Publication | |
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2023 | Karl O'Hanlon (2023) '‘A modification of the Treaty’: W.B. Yeats, W.T. Cosgrave, and secret peace talks in London during the Civil War' The Irish Story, . [Link] | |
2022 | Karl O'Hanlon (2022) ''Dublin's Socialist Theatre Troupe'' Tribune, . | |
2020 | Elleke Boehmer, Shirley Chew, Shara McCallum, and Karl O'Hanlon (2020) 'Tributes to Eavan Boland' Stand, 18 (2) . | |
2018 | Karl O'Hanlon (2018) ''Paying Its Way' (review of Evan Kindley, Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture. 2017.)' PN Review, 44 (6) . | |
2017 | Karl O'Hanlon (2017) 'Ovid in America' Stand, 15 (2) :57-61. |
Book Review
Year | Publication | |
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2022 | Karl O'Hanlon (2022) The Letters of Denis Devlin ed. by Sarah Bennett, and: Irish Writers and the Thirties: Art, Exile and War by Katrina Goldstone (review). [Book Review] | |
2022 | Karl O'Hanlon (2022) 'Lightbringers': review of George Szirtes & Denise Riley. Dublin: [Book Review] | |
2022 | Karl O'Hanlon (2022) Observing Proportion (review of Maurice Scully, Airs. [Book Review] [Link] | |
2019 | Karl O'Hanlon (2019) Review, The Book of Baruch by the Gnostic Justin (Oxford University Press, 2019). Sheffield: [Book Review] | |
2017 | O'Hanlon, K (2017) One wide expanse: writings from the Ireland chair of poetry. ABINGDON: [Book Review] [DOI] | |
2016 | O'Hanlon, K (2016) Quantum Poetics: Newcastle/Bloodaxe Poetry Lectures. OXFORD: [Book Review] [DOI] | |
2015 | Karl O'Hanlon (2015) 'To Think Harder in Verse' (review of Philip Coleman, John Berryman's Public Vision: Relocating the Scene of Disorder UCD 2014. Manchester: [Book Review] | |
2014 | Karl O'Hanlon (2014) ‘Dark with excessive bright’ Review of Geoffrey Hill, Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952-2012 (Oxford University Press, 2013). Sheffield: [Book Review] | |
2014 | Karl O'Hanlon (2014) 'Late Poems' (review of Thomas Kinsella). Leeds: [Book Review] | |
2016 | O'Hanlon, K (2016) Visionary Philology: Geoffrey Hill and the Study of Words. BALTIMORE: [Book Review] |
Newspaper Articles
Year | Publication | |
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2022 | Karl O'Hanlon (2022) An Irish poet confronts the Holocaust during the second World War. [Newspaper Articles] | |
2022 | Karl O'Hanlon (2022) Remembering my great-aunt Eliza, killed in Weaver Street bombing 100 years ago today. [Newspaper Articles] [Link] | |
2020 | Karl O'Hanlon (2020) Desmond FitzGerald on T.S. Eliot: a revolutionary taste in poetry. Dublin: [Newspaper Articles] |
Reviews
Year | Publication | |
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2019 | Levay M.; Bratton F.; Krzakowski C.; Keese A.; Corser S.; Livingstone C.; West M.; Cooper S.; D'Monte R.; Martin G.A.R.g.; Saunders G.; Baker W.; Masud N.; Creasy M.; Alonso A.; O'Hanlon K. (2019) Modern literature. [Reviews] [DOI] | |
2018 | Levay M.; Radford A.; Krzakowski C.; Keese A.; Dick M.; Livingstone C.; Tweed H.; Rodríguez Martín G.; Saunders G.; Baker W.; Creasy M.; O'Hanlon K.; Hanna A. (2018) Modern literature. [Reviews] [DOI] [Full-Text] |
Poetry
Year | Publication | |
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2022 | Karl O'Hanlon (2022) 'Ugolino's Last Son'. [Poetry] | |
2022 | Karl O'Hanlon (2022) 'Night Rabbits' and other poems. [Poetry] [Link] | |
2021 | Karl O'Hanlon (2021) 'Eigg' and 'Two Pigeons'. [Poetry] [Link] | |
2021 | Karl O'Hanlon (2021) 'Rooks at Moyglare'. [Poetry] | |
2021 | Karl O'Hanlon (2021) 'The Co-ordinates of Fear'. [Poetry] [Link] | |
2020 | Karl O'Hanlon (2020) 'Calvinist Spider in Ballymoney Service Station'. [Poetry] | |
2020 | Karl O'Hanlon (2020) 'Study in Grisette' and other poems. [Poetry] | |
2019 | Karl O'Hanlon (2019) From In Our Outrageous Masks of Dog-Skin. Kings College, London: [Poetry] | |
2018 | Karl O'Hanlon (2018) 'Three Poems'. [Poetry] | |
2017 | Karl O'Hanlon (2017) from In Memory of Geoffrey Hill. Chicago: [Poetry] | |
2017 | Karl O'Hanlon (2017) Two poems. Sheffield: [Poetry] | |
2016 | Karl O'Hanlon (2016) Three poems (The Insular Style and other poems). Manchester: [Poetry] | |
2015 | Karl O'Hanlon (2015) Clifford's Tower. Leeds: [Poetry] | |
2014 | Karl O'Hanlon (2014) Two poems. Sheffield: [Poetry] |