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Faculties & Departments
Department of English
Professor Joseph Cleary, MA, M.Phil, PhD (Columbia)
Office & Contact Details
Office 14, Arts Building, North Campus
Tel: +353 (1) 7083765
Email: jncleary@nuim.ie
Consultation Times: Tuesday 4.15pm to 6.15pm or by appointment.
Joe Cleary is a Professor in English at NUI Maynooth. He was educated in NUI Maynooth and in Columbia University, New York, where he studied with Edward W. Said. 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 also 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). His articles on modern Irish writing and literary history have appeared in American, British and Irish journals including South Atlantic Quarterly, Boundary 2, Textual Practice, The Irish Review and The Field Day Review. He was a Visiting Professor at Notre Dame University in 2002, and he is currently Director of the Notre Dame Irish Seminar, which is held annually in O’Connell House, Merrion Square, Dublin. He has lectured in many US and European universities, including Yale, Columbia, NYU, Cambridge, University of California at Berkeley, University of Pittsburgh, Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto, University of Cyprus, Nicosia, and in Bigli University, Istanbul. He was the winner of a Government of Ireland Senior Research Fellowship in 2004-2005. Teaching and research interests include: Twentieth-Century Irish Culture, Literature and Empire, Modernism, Cultural and Critical Theory, and Literary History. He is interested in supervising doctoral students in any of these areas. He is currently working on a book on literature and the decline of empire in modern Europe and on a study of the history of twentieth-century Irish cultural criticism.
Recent Publications:
Literature, Partition and the Nation State
The history of partition in the twentieth century is one steeped in controversy and violence. Literature, Partition and the Nation State offers an extended study of the social and cultural legacies of state division in Ireland and Palestine, two regions where the trauma of partition continues to shape political events to this day. Focusing on the period since the 1960s, when the original partition settlements in each region were challenged by Irish and Palestinian nationalists, Joe Cleary’s book contains individual chapters on nationalism and self-determination; on the construction of national literatures in the wake of state division; and on influential Irish, Israeli and Palestinian writers, film-makers and public intellectuals. Cleary’s book is a radical and enthralling intervention into contemporary scholarship from a range of disciplines on nations and nationalism. It will be of interest to scholars in Cultural and Post-Colonial Studies, Nations and Nationalism, Irish Literature, Middle East Studies and Modern History.
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The Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture Edited by Joe Cleary
This Companion provides an authoritative introduction to the historical, social and stylistic complexities of modern Irish culture. Readers will be introduced to Irish culture in its widest sense and helped to find their way through the cultural and theoretical debates that inform our understanding of modern Ireland. The volume combines cultural breadth and historical depth, supported by a chronology of Irish history and arts. A wide selection of essays on a rich variety of Irish cultural forms and practices are complemented by a series of in-depth analyses of key themes in Irish cultural politics. The range of topics covered will enable a comprehensive understanding of Irish culture, while the authors gathered here - all acknowledged experts in their fields - provide stimulating new essays that together amount to an invaluable guide to the shaping of modern Ireland.
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Outrageous Fortune
Did Ireland produce a more radical and ambitious literature in the straitened circumstances of the first half of the twentieth century than it had managed to do since it began to 'modernize' and become more affluent from the 1960s onwards? Has Irish modernism ceded place to a prevailing naturalism that seems gritty and tough-minded, but that is aesthetically conservative and politically self-thwarted? Does the fixation with 'de Valera's Ireland' in recent narrative represent a necessary settling of accounts with a dark, abusive history or is it indicative of a worrying inability on the part of Irish artists and intellectuals to respond to the very different predicaments of the post-Cold War world?
These are some of the questions addressed in Outrageous Fortune. Scanning literature, theatre, film and music, Joe Cleary probes the connections between capital, culture and criticism in modern Ireland. He includes readings of James Joyce and the Irish Modernists, the naturalists Patrick Kavanagh, John McGahern and Enda O'Brien, and comments too on what he terms the 'neo-naturalism' of Marina Carr, Partick McCabe and Martin Mc Donagh. He concludes with a provocative analysis of the cultural achievement of the Pogues.
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Media Appearances
The Tubridy Show, RTE Radio 1 - Wednesday 20th December 2006
Fairytale of New York is the great Irish Christmas carol, but what are the other songs, plays, music and books that evoke memories of a particularly Irish Christmas? Academic Joe Cleary; writers Pat McCabe and Mary Arrigan offer their selections.