Perry Anderson is one of the most influential figures on the intellectual left in the late twentieth century. His surveys of Western Marxist thought and his editing of New Left Review have disseminated a range of European Marxist intellectual traditions to the English-speaking world. He teaches at UCLA (where he has a joint appointment in History and Sociology) and is the author of numerous works including Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (1974); Lineages of the Absolutist State (1974); Considerations on Western Marxism (1979); Arguments within English Marxism (1980); In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (1983);
English Questions (1992); A Zone of Engagement (1992); The Question
of Europe (1997); The Origins of Postmodernity (1998); and Spectrum (2005).
Giovanni Arrighi is Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University and one of the world’s leading theorists in the field of world systems analysis. Having received his PhD in economics from the University of Milan in1960, he went to Africa in 1963 where he conducted research on African development and published several books on this topic. In 1979 he joined Immanuel Wallerstein and Terence Hopkins as a Professor of Sociology at the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems, and Civilizations at SUNY Binghampton. In this period, the Fernand Braudel Center became the main center for the development of world-systems analysis, attracting scholars from all over the world. Among Arrighi’s many influential publications are Geometry of Imperialism (1978); The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (1994); Chaos and Governance in the Modern World System (with Beverly Silver) and Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century (2007).
Richard Bourke teaches in the History Department at Queen Mary, University of London. He has been a Fellow of the John Carter Brown Library (2004) and an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Historical Institute at the University of Munich (2006–07). He has published on modern Irish politics, on British romanticism and on enlightenment political theory, with a particular focus on the thought of Edmund Burke. His most recent monograph is Peace in Ireland: The War of Ideas (Random House: London, 2003).
Joe Cleary is a Professor in English at the National University of
Ireland, Maynooth. He is the author of Literature, Partition and the
Nation-State: Culture and Conflict in Ireland, Israel and Palestine
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) and Outrageous Fortune:
Capital and Culture in Modern Ireland (Dublin: Field Day Publications,
2007). He has co-edited (with Claire Connolly) The Cambridge Companion
to Modern Irish Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)
and, with Michael de Nie, a special issue of Éire-Ireland on ‘Empire
Studies’ (Summer 2007).
Michael G. Cronin teaches modern Irish and American literature in the Department of English at NUI Maynooth. He is currently completing his PhD on sexuality in the twentieth-century Irish Catholic bildungsroman. He has been an IRCHSS Government of Ireland scholar and participated in the 2005 Irish Seminar as a doctoral student. He has written on contemporary Irish gay fiction in Éire-Ireland and other publications.
Seamus Deane, poet, novelist and critic, is Keough Professor of Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Among his publications are The Field Day Anthology of Irish Literature (1991), the novel Reading in the Dark (1996) and Foreign Affections:Burke, Ireland and Europe (2005).
Terry Eagleton has published some of the most influential works of contemporary new left cultural theory, including Criticism & Ideology (1976); Walter Benjamin, or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (1981); Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983, revised 1996); The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990); Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (2002); and After Theory (2003). He moved to Ireland in the 1990s and has published a trilogy of works on Irish culture, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger (1996); Crazy John and the Bishop and Other Essays on Irish Culture (1998) and Scholars and Rebels (1999). Having spent much of his career at Oxford University, he is currently Professor of Cultural Theory at the University of Manchester. Jed Esty is Associate Professor of English and Critical Theory at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of A
Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England (2004) and
coeditor of Postcolonial Studies and Beyond (2005).
Luke Gibbons is Keough Family Chair of Irish Studies at Notre Dame. Among his publications are Transformations in Irish Culture (1996), The Quiet Man (2002) and Edmund Burke and Ireland (2003). Kevin Honan has taught the History of Art for many years, and he is particularly interested in palaeography and the history of lettering. He has exhibited in the Royal Hibernian Academy, the Chester Beatty Library and Dundalk Town Hall and has published occasional articles on contemporary letter arts and literature.
Sinéad Kennedy is the Learning Resource Officer and occasional lecturer in English at NUI Maynooth. Her PhD dissertation on Marxism and Modernism, which engaged with issues of modernist writing, urbanism and modernity, was completed in 2007. She is also a political activist based in Dublin and has lectured widely in Ireland and England in that capacity. Barry McCrea is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University. He studied at Trinity College, Dublin (B.A. Sch. in French and Spanish, 1997), and at Princeton University (Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, 2004). His novel, The First Verse (Carroll & Graf, 2005) is published in Ireland by Brandon Books in May. He is currently finishing a book on family and the modern novel (Dickens, Conan Doyle, Joyce and Proust).
Rónán McDonald is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Reading and the Director of the Beckett International Foundation. His books include Tragedy and Irish Literature (2002), The Cambridge Introduction to Samuel Beckett (2006) and The Death of the Critic (2007). He is currently working on a new book on Darwinism and degeneration in the Irish Revival.
Chris Morash is Head of English in the School of English, Theatre and Media Studies at NUI Maynooth. His publications include A History of Irish Theatre 1601-2000 (2002) and Writing the Irish Famine (1996). He is currently writing a history of the Irish media since 1550 for Cambridge University Press. He became a member of the Royal Irish Academy in 2007.
Emer Nolan lectures in English at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, where she is the director of the Department's MA programmes on 'Twentieth-Century Irish Writing' and 'Culture, Empire, Postcolonialism.' She is the author of James Joyce and Nationalism (Routledge, 1995) and Catholic Emancipations: Irish Fiction from Thomas Moore to James Joyce (Syracuse University Press, 2007), and editor of the new Field Day edition of Thomas Moore's Memoirs of Captain Rock (2008).
Lionel Pilkington is a Senior Lecturer in English at NUI Galway and Course Director for the MA in Culture and Colonialism. He is the author of Theatre and the State in Twentieth-Century Ireland (Routledge, 2001) and he has written widely on the theatre of the Irish Revival and on many leading late twentieth-century Irish playwrights including Tom Murphy, Sam Thompson, Brian Friel, and others. He is currently engaged in a project concerned with Ireland's non-institutional theatrical practices.
Jacqueline Rose studied at Oxford, the Sorbonne and London, and teaches literature at Queen Mary, University of London. An internationally distinguished feminist and critic, she has written widely on literature, feminism, nationalism and psychoanalysis and on the on the history and culture of South Africa and of Israel-Palestine. Her many publications include The Case of Peter Pan: Or, the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (1984), The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (1992), Why War?—Psychoanalysis, Politics, and the Return to Melanie Klein (1993), States of Fantasy (1996), Sexuality in the Field of Vision (1996, reissued 2006); Albertine: A Novel (2001); On Not Being Able to Sleep: Essays on Psychoanalysis in the Modern World (2003); The Question of Zion (2005); and The Last Resistance (2007). She writes regular reviews for The London Review of Books on a wide variety of issues, including psychoanalysis, Jewish culture and the politics of the Middle East.
Sean Ryder lectures in the Department of English at the National University of Ireland, Galway. His publications have focused mainly on nineteenth-century Irish culture and nationalism and on the theory and practice of textual editing. He is currently project director of the IRCHSS-funded Thomas Moore Hypermedia Archive.
Clair Wills is Professor of Irish Literature at Queen Mary, University of London. She has written widely on contemporary Irish poetry, including Improprieties: Politics and Sexuality in Northern Irish Poetry (1993) and Reading Paul Muldoon (1998). She was editor of the Contemporary Writing section of the Field Day Anthology: Irish Women's Writing and Traditions, Vols. IV and V. Her most recent work is That Neutral Island: A Cultural History of Ireland During the Second World War (Faber and Faber and Harvard University Press, 2007). She is currently working on British and Irish writing of the 1950s. Kevin Whelan is Michael J. Smurfit director of the Keough-Notre Dame Centre in Dublin. Among his publications are Fellowship of Freedom (1998), Acts of Union (2001) and 1798: bicentenary essays (2003).