Nicholas Taylor-Collins BA (Hons), MA, PhD

Academic Posts

Postdoctoral Associate Fellow, Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick, 2015-present.

Tutor (seminars and lectures), Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick, 2012-present.

Qualifications

PhD, Forming the Nation: Early Modern England and Modern Ireland, Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick, 2011-2015, supervised by Professor Thomas Docherty and Professor Carol Rutter. Examined by Professor Anne Fogarty (UCD) and Professor Michael Gardiner (Warwick).

MA (Distinction) in Post-1900 Literatures, Theories and Cultures, University of Manchester, 2010-2011.

BA (Hons) (Upper Second: 68 av.) in English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick, 2007-2010.

Publications under consideration

Monograph

Remember, Remember: Shakespeare, Memory and Modern Ireland: under review at Palgrave Macmillan.

Articles and essays

‘Hospitality and Civil War in Coriolanus and Ciaran Carson’s Belfastâ’ (to be submitted to Shakespeare Quarterly).

Publications

Edited Collection

Shakespeare and Contemporary Irish Literature, co-edited with Stanley van der Ziel (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming).

Articles and Essays

‘Woman’s Two Bodies of Memory: Edna O’Brien’s Country Girls Trilogy and Queen Elizabeth I’ in Queenship and Power (ed. Paranque and Schutte, forthcoming, 2018).

‘Eavan Boland: Shakespeare’s surviving mother and daughter’ (for inclusion in co-edited Shakespeare and Contemporary Irish Literature; forthcoming).

‘“Remember me”: Hamlet, memory and Bloom’s poiesis’, Irish Studies Review, 25.2 (2017), 241-58, doi: 10.1080/09670882.2017.1299606.

‘Heartache in Remembering 1916’, theirishrevolution.ie (March 2016).

‘“This prison where I live”: Ireland takes Centre Stage’, Cahiers Elisabéthains, 88.1 (2015), 125-38.

‘“[L]ike a shoal of fish moving within a net”: King Lear and McGahern’s Family in Amongst Women’, in John McGahern: Critical Essays, ed. by Mullen, Bargroff and Mullen (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2014), pp. 113-36.

Reviews

Poets and the Peacock Dinner: The Literary History of a Meal (Lucy McDiarmid) in Notes & Queries, forthcoming (September 2017).

The Irish Dancing: Cultural Politics and Identities, 1900-2000 (Barbara O’Connor) in Irish Studies Review, 25.1, 122-24 (2017), doi: 10.1080/09670882.2016.1273819.

The Celtic Revival in Shakespeare’s Wake: Appropriation and Cultural Politics, 1867-1922 (Adam Putz) in Irish University Review, 45.1 (2015), 181-5.

W. B. Yeats’s A Vision: Explications and Contexts (ed. by Mann, Gibson and Nally) in Irish Studies Review, 21.4 (2013), 488-90.

The Myth of Manliness in Irish National Culture, 1880-1922 (Joseph Valente) in Irish Studies Review, 20.3 (2012), 338-40.

‘This Earthly Stage’: World and Stage in Late Medieval and Early Modern England (ed. by Hirsch and Wortham) in Shakespeare in Southern Africa, 24 (2012), 71-4.

Research Projects

Current

In Remember, Remember: Shakespeare and the Modern Irish Nation-State I address the memory of Shakespeare that is foregrounded when we now commemorate the emerging modern Irish nation-state, and its constituting literature throughout the twentieth century. A meta-analysis of memory, the monograph argues that memory itself is remembered in these centenary celebrations.

Future

I next propose to examine Paul Ricoeur’s Memory, History, Forgetting in relation to Shakespeare’s construction of memory and archive. My test case will be Romeo and Juliet as it offers a repeated entombment throughout the play, in line with Ricoeur’s description of history-writing.

Papers

Invited Papers

27-28 February 2015, ‘Queen Elizabeth I and Edna O’Brien: Biopolitics through time’, Translation, Adaptation, and Rewriting in Irish and Scottish Literature and Film, University of Aberdeen.

15 November 2014, ‘Bloom, memory and poetry in Joyce’s “Hades”’, Memory/Modernity: Where Gothic and Irish Studies Intersect, St Mary’s University.

Conference Papers

25-29 July 2016, ‘1916: Remembering the Renaissance’, IASIL Annual Conference, University College Cork.

30 October 2015, ‘Ruined: The Country Girl and the Virgin Queen’, Biopolitical Ireland, King’s College London.

14-18 July 2014, ‘“strange pain, strange sin”: the body and its economy in Samuel Beckett, Edna O’Brien and William Shakespeare‘’, IASIL Annual Conference, Université Charles de Gaulle‑Lille 3.

3-6 July 2014, ‘Shakespeare, Heaney, and rupture’, British Shakespeare Association Annual Conference, University of Stirling.

9-10 November 2013, ‘“[S]omeone wholly other”: Banville’s double-inheritance in Ghosts, from Hamlet and Joyce’s Bloom’, Banville and His Precursors, University of York.

22-26 July 2013, ‘The Irish for “Let them hang”: from Carson’s Belfast to Coriolanus’s Rome’, Urban Cultures, IASIL Annual Conference, Queen’s University, Belfast.

15-16 March 2013, ‘“[L]ike a shoal of fish moving within a net”: endo- and exogeny, or father- and brotherhood in the family Amongst Women’, A Way of Seeing: 50 Years of McGahern in Print, Queen’s University, Belfast.

21 November 2012, ‘“[R]emember me”: Leopold Bloom's spectral and Hamletic hangover in Joyce’s “Hades”’, Arts Faculty Seminar Series, University of Warwick.

30 March 2012, ‘“This prison where I live”: Ireland takes centre stage-space’, Space on the Elizabethan Stage, University of Leeds.

11 May 2011, ‘‘“N****r this! N****r that!”: Judith Butler’s citational language in post-Civil Rights filmic representations of blackness’, Postgraduate American Studies Conference: Race, Film and Cultural Politics, University of Manchester.

Journal Contributions

Editor for Exchanges, the University of Warwick Institute of Advanced Studies postgraduate journal, 2016-ongoing.

Peer-reviewer for Irish Studies Review, 2016-ongoing.

Copy-editor for Review of English Studies, 2014-2016.

Proofreader for Parliamentary Affairs, 2014-2016.

Impact and Public Engagement

Co-organiser of Highgate School’s ‘Shakespeare Day’, attended by academics and local secondary-school teachers to aid pedagogical transfer, June 2016.

‘Heartache in Remembering 1916’, theirishrevolution.ie, article commissioned and published in March 2016.

Blog on http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/njscollins.

Contributor to Massolit (http://massolit.herokuap.com), an online repository of humanities lectures.

Contributor to the Young Fabians Schools’ Scheme on politics, giving presentations in schools, 2011-2012.

Awards

Scholarship for the Dublin James Joyce Summer School, run by University College, Dublin and Boston College, Dublin, 2013, worth c. €1000.

University of Warwick Humanities Research Centre (HRC), Postgraduate Scholar 2012-2013 (interdisciplinary research project), worth c. £3000.

Postgraduate Warwick Award for Teaching Excellence – longlist, 2013.

STARS of Warwick Awards ‘Best Academic for Undergraduates’ final shortlist, 2013.

Thomas Arno fund of the Worshipful Company of Haberdashers, book grant and research travel grant (awarded separately), 2011-2013, worth £800.

Full Block Grant Studentship from the Arts and Humanities Research Council for master’s study, 2010-2011, worth c. £13,000.

Employment

University of Warwick, 2012-present

2016-present: EN301 ‘Shakespeare and Selected Dramatists’, seminars and lectures (honours level).

2016-present: EN123 ‘Modern World Literature’, seminars.

2012-2016: EN331 ‘Poetry in English since 1945’, seminars (honours level).

2012-2015: EN122 ‘Modes of Reading’, seminars.

2012-2013: EN351 ‘Modern and Contemporary Irish and Scottish Literature’, seminars (honours level).

Highgate School, 2015-present

Part-time teacher, teaching English Language and Literature to 14-18-year-old students in a secondary school. Teaching includes KS4 and KS5 learning, comprising preparation for public examination, including GCSE and Pre-U. I also undertake pastoral duties as Form Tutor to sixth-form students preparing for university applications. Additionally, I have been asked to deliver extension lectures, and co-organise the Junior Debating club and Junior English society.

Hampton School, 2013, 2014-2015

Part-time teacher, teaching English Language and Literature to 11-18-year old students in a secondary school. Teaching included KS3, KS4 and KS5 learning. KS4 and KS5 teaching comprised preparation for public examination, including GCSE and A-level. Additionally, I was asked to deliver extension lectures.

Private tuition, 2009-2013

I taught English Literature to several students in KS3-KS5, including in preparation for A‑levels.

Consult Write, editorial consultancy, 2011-present

I founded an editorial consultancy to copywrite, copy-edit and proofread for several clients, ranging from Oxford University Press to graduate students.

Memberships

British Association for Irish Studies

International Association for Studies in Irish Literature

European Shakespeare Research Association

British Shakespeare Association

Council for the Defence of British Universities

Notable Achievements

Co-organiser with fellow Postgraduate Scholars of the HRC-sponsored, one-day, interdisciplinary conference: ‘Myth-making: from Medusa to Madonna’, 18 June 2013, University of Warwick.

Contributor to Highgate School’s Adult Literacy Programme.

School governor at Campion Academy, Leamington Spa, including chair of Learning & Improvement Committee (2011-2013).

Comment writer for studentjournals.co.uk (2013).

Chair of the Postgraduate Student-Staff Liaison Committee (SSLC), Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick, 2011-2012. Member of Committee, 2012-2013.

Contact Me

n dot collins dot 2 at warwick dot ac dot uk

Office hour: Mondays 10-11am H541

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