Professor Philip Coleman

I came to Trinity in 1995, having read for a BA in English and Philosophy in University College Cork. After completing an MPhil in Anglo-Irish Literature in TCD in 1996, I wrote a PhD thesis on the poetry of John Berryman, which I completed in 2001. My doctoral research was partly funded by the Irish Research Council for Humanities and Social Sciences and Fulbright Ireland (https://www.fulbright.ie/custom_alumni/prof-philip-coleman/). I reflect on my academic journey to date here: http://ijas.iaas.ie/issue-9-philip-coleman/. My first academic appointments were in UCD as a Postdoctoral Fellow (2002) and in UCC as a Temporary Lecturer (2002-03). I was appointed to a Lectureship in English (Broad Curriculum) in Trinity in 2003. In 2006 I was appointed to a permanent lectureship in English Studies (Literature of the Americas), and in 2006-07 I was first Director of the MPhil in Literatures of the Americas program. In 2008 and 2012 I was Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of English at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, and in 2009 I was Visiting Professor in the English Department at the Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary. In 2015, I was made a Fellow of Trinity College Dublin. From 2018-2021, I was Registrar of Chambers in Trinity and I served as Junior Dean from 2020-23. My research to date has focused mainly on US American poetry, short fiction, and the essay, but I also have a long-standing interest in modern and contemporary Irish poetry in English. My teaching and postgraduate supervision reflects these interests.

  American literature   American Poetry   Anglo-Irish literature, poetry   Contemporary poetry in English   Modernism   Short Fiction

My research to date has focussed on (i) modern and contemporary poetry, (ii) modern and contemporary short fiction, (iii) the essay. In each of these areas my focus has been on US American writing, but I have also made contributions in the areas of Irish poetry and modernist studies. My edition of the letters of John Berryman published by Harvard University Press (2020) represents a major contribution to the field of American literary studies, and has been described by Mark Ford (University College London) as "a book that will reconfigure forever our understanding of mid-century American poetry". Following the publication of my earlier books and essays, this work affirms my presence as the leading global authority on Berryman. My research on other key poets, including T.S. Eliot, Muriel Rukeyser, Robert Lowell, Dylan Thomas, Derek Mahon, and Peter Gizzi, has been published in journals and collections including Edinburgh and Wesleyan UP. My research on modern and contemporary American short fiction includes essays on writers ranging from Edgar Allan Poe and Chuck Palahniuk to Alice Munro, Sandra Cisneros, and George Saunders. I have edited and contributed to definitive works on David Foster Wallace, including a volume published by the prestigious Modern Language Association. I co-edited the first collection of scholarly essays on George Saunders. In addition to these projects, I have published co-edited collections of essays on the modernist journal BLAST and the Irish poet Pearse Hutchinson, building on national and international research collaborations. My work on the essay has been published in the Cambridge History of the British Essay and the Cambridge History of the American Essay. I am currently working in a project on Modernist Essayisms that builds on the recent work I have done on the essay.