Dr. Elizabeth Barry
BA (York); MPhil, DPhil (Oxford).
Current projects
I am currently working on a monograph on modernism and ageing, writing from several angles on modernism and the philosphy of psychiatry, and developing new transdisciplinary pedagogy in medical humanities. I am also involved in editing a special issue of the international Journal of Medical Humanities. In 2012, I was Principal Investigator on an AHRC Exploratory Award ('Beckett and Brain Science').
Research interests
Research interests include English and French modernism, especially Beckett and Woolf; modern British and Irish theatre; Irish Studies and Anglo-Irish writing; the cultural history of celebrity; the writing of death (epitaph, obituary, graveyard poetry) and its political uses in nineteenth and twentieth century Europe; and more recently literature, psychology and neuroscience. I have published articles and book chapters on subjects such as Beckett and religious language, Beckett and Romanticism, the politics of translation, Black British theatre, Sarah Kane, and Jean Genet.
Selected publications
Beckett and Authority: The Uses of Cliche (Palgrave Macmillan: 2006)
Ed., The Cultural History of Celebrity, special issue of International Journal of Cultural Studies, Dec 2008
Ed., Beckett, Language and the Mind, special issue of Journal of Beckett Studies, Dec 2009
Invited talks 2013-14
'Beckett and the Phenomenology of Ageing', Northern Modernism Seminar, November 2013
'Beckett and the Brain: An Interdisciplinary Approach', Centre for Cognition, Kinaesthetics and Performance, University of Kent, November 2013
'Beckett and Psychiatry' (interdisciplinary workshop), Institute of Psychiatry, Kings College, London, January 2014
'Beckett, Modernism and the Medical Mind', Centre for Medical Humanities, University of Leeds February 2014
Teaching and supervision
Research supervision: I have supervised graduate work on Samuel Beckett, literature and psychoanalysis, the Anglo-Irish tradition, Northern Irish poetry and modern American Theatre. I would welcome research projects in the fields of Irish Studies, post-1940 British and European fiction, modern theatre and modernist stylistics, and on literature (particularly modernist literature) and psychology, psychiatry, neurology and neuroscience.
I currently have three PhD students:
- Madolyn Nichols (working on anti-emigration literature, gender and politics in early twentieth-century Irish writing)
- Robert Starr (working on WW1 fiction and memoir written by Irish soldiers fighting with the British Army)
- Catherine Charlwood (working on cultural and cognitive models of memory in the poetry of Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost)
MA teaching: I convene the MA module Outcast Ireland: Institutions and the Making of Irish Society 1801-2000 with Professor Maria Luddy from the Department of History.
In development for 2014-15 is an interdisciplinary Masters-level module on The Medical Mind in Literature and Culture with Jonathan Heron from Warwick's Institute of Advanced Teaching and Learning (IATL).
Undergraduate teaching: I convene the first year module British Theatre since 1939, and the Special Subject Anglo-Irish Literature. I also teach and lecture on the module European Theatre, and lecture on Modern World Literatures.
