Undergraduate

Originally from north London, I migrated to the midlands to read for my bachelor's degree in English and Comparative Literature at the University of Warwick. I completed modules in literature and theory from the Ancients to the present day. The modules that have most shaped my current research are the Epic Tradition, Shakespeare and Contemporary Dramatists, Poetry in English since 1945, Literary and Cultural Theory and Literature and Psychoanalysis. My undergraduate dissertation examined postmodernity in J. G. Ballard's fiction, supervised by Dr Pablo Mukherjee. I graduated in 2010.

Postgraduate

I headed further northwards for my master's study and at The University of Manchester I completed a taught degree in Post-1900 Literatures, Theories and Cultures. Aside from modules in critical theory, English modernist fiction, contemporary Irish and Scottish fiction and black culture in post-Civil Rights America, I completed my dissertation in post-1968 poetry of Belfast. I was supervised by Dr Alan Rawes. I graduated from The University of Manchester in 2011.

Doctoral Research

After my master's I returned to the University of Warwick and started researching for my PhD in October 2011. Inspired by James Joyce's Ulysses, my original research proposal outlined a thesis that would examine the Hamletic nature of heroes in twentieth-century Irish fiction. However, after a series of ongoing evolutions, my thesis is currently divided into five spatial chapters: spectral spaces, body spaces, land spaces, familial spaces and itinerant spaces. In each of these chapters I outline the specifically Hamletic enumerations of these spaces, before continuing to demonstrate how these Hamletic ideas are taken up in Irish literature of the twentieth century. These ideas culminate in my (working) thesis title of '"Hic et ubique": Hamlet's space in twentieth-century Irish literature'. My work is supervised by Professor Thomas Docherty.

Contact Me

Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies
University of Warwick
Coventry
CV4 7AL
England

n dot j dot s dot collins at warwick dot ac dot uk

@njscollins

Currently reading:

Tzvetan Todorov. On Human Diversity. Harvard UP, 1993.