Professor Stephen Matterson

Stephen Matterson took his BA in English and History at Sunderland Polytechnic was awarded a PhD through the CNAA, with supervision from Raman Selden and Gareth Reeves atthe University of Durham. He taught at Sunderland and at the University of Minnesota before taking up a post at Trinity College, Dublin in 1986. He was elected Fellow in 1998 and was made a Senior Lecturer in 1998. He was the Head of the Department of English 2003-6, and with the inauguration of the School of English he is currently head of School. A specialist in American literature, he has published work on a wide range of American writers, notably Melville, Stevens, Lowell and Berryman, and has a special interest in race and literature and in the literature of the American South. He has also written extensively on poetry, and has co-edited a collection of essays on The American Poetry Book. He has been very involved in the Irish and the European Associations of American Studies, and was the joint founding editor of the Journal of the Irish Association of American Studies. He has successfully supervised many M.Litt and PhD theses in several areas and particularly on modern American poetry.

  20th Century poetry   American Literature generally, especially Herman Melville   Poetry of Wallace Stevens   Representations of Race in American Literature

In broadest terms my research has been focused on American literature. While I've published and worked on the earlier period, my major area has been on post American Renaissance 19th century, and on modern and contemporary writing. Generically I've been reasonably divided between an interest in US prose fiction, and in US poetry, especially poetry of the period 1930 to 1980. While my research is varied, my major monographs have been on Herman Melville and the representation of clothing in his fiction, and on the key poets of the so-called middle generation, Robert Lowell and John Berryman. I am a particularly strong believer in the importance of collaborative research, especially where this helps in the development of a younger scholar or early-stage academic. Thus, my research outputs include collections of essays jointly edited with three of my former PhD students, Philip Coleman, Michael Hinds and Bernice Murphy, and the then developing scholar Lucy Collins, One of my planned projects is with a recently graduated PhD student of mine, Sarah Cullen. In some regards I have been fortunate in being able to develop research from my own initiative and which is closely linked with my teaching and research supervision. At the same time I've been reluctant to cultivate only one research profile. For instance, when I worked on my Melville book, colleagues tended to assume I would become exclusively a Melvillean--as many of my most admired colleagues have done, and that my research would be grounded there. But my interests remain varied and need to come from my own personal engagement at some level. My current project, the formulas of Henry James has grown from a long-held engagement with James along with an emerging recognition of his interest in how human relations may be represented as formulaic. I'm at the happy stage of researching and reflecting on this, without necessarily defining the actual research output--monograph, a series of articles, or a special issue of a Journal.