Lauren Arrington

I joined Maynooth in 2019, having taught for ten years at the University of Liverpool. Prior to that, I was Adrian Research Fellow in English at Darwin College, Cambridge University. My doctorate is from Oxford University.

I'm a literary critic and cultural historian, and my work concentrates on the intersections of literature and political change in the twentieth century, working across Irish, British, and U.S. writers.    I have supervised PhDs on topics in Irish and British modernism and in Irish theatre, and I welcome proposals for research in these areas as well as in other aspects of twentieth-century literature.  

My most recent book is The Poets of Rapallo: how Mussolini's Italy shaped British, Irish, and U.S. Writers (Oxford University Press, 2021). My other books include a family biography Revolutionary Lives (Princeton University Press, 2016) about the socialist feminist revolutionary Constance Markievicz and her vagabond husband, Casimir, and the academic study W.B. Yeats, the Abbey Theatre, Censorship, and the Irish State (Oxford University Press, 2010). I am currently editing, with Matthew Campbell, the Oxford Handbook of W.B. Yeats (forthcoming 2022) and am editor of Late Modernism and Expatriation (Clemson UP, 2022). My writing has also been published in major scholarly journals in the fields of literature and history, including History Workshop Journal, The Journal of British Studies, and Modernism/modernity.

I enjoy writing for popular audiences and have published essays in Literary Hub as well as in the  TLS and the Irish Times. I’ve been a guest of BBC Parliament, BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour, BBC Radio Ulster, and have served as consultant for various media outlets and for theatre productions.  

My appointments include a semester as Burns Distinguished Visiting Scholar in Irish Studies at Boston College; as visiting fellow at Cambridge University's Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities; as a fellow at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, and twice as a visiting fellow at Trinity College Dublin's Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute. In spring 2022, I'll be a visiting fellow at the New York Public Library in relation to my new creative non-fiction project on women artists in the Great Depression.

At Maynooth, I teach poetry and drama and a special seminar on war writing.