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Professor Claire Lynch
Professor

Gaskell Building 134

Research area(s)

  • Irish Literature
  • Autobiography and Life Writing
  • Cyberculture and hypertexts
  • Childhood and youth

Research Interests

My research sits in and across two significant areas of literary scholarship: Irish Studies and Life Writing. I have published articles in the leading peer reviewed journals in my fields including, Auto/Biography, Biography, Prose Studies, Irish Studies Review and Irish University Review. My reputation in the field is cemented by invitations to contribute to generation defining collections, including the forthcoming Oxford Handbook to W.B. Yeats (Oxford University Press) and Technologies in/of Irish Literature (Cambridge University Press).

My first monograph Irish Autobiography: Stories of Selves in the Narrative of a Nation (2009) continues to be significant as testified by reviews in all of the major journals in the field. My second monograph Cyber Ireland: Text, Image, Culture (2014), published by Palgrave, is the first monograph to explore the intersections between cyber culture and Irish literature. Over six chapters, the book examines how Irish writers engage with new technologies and the parallel impact such technologies have on Irish writing. The book is the result of several years sustained investigation which included conducting interviews with government agencies, games designers, programmers, and digital artists. Detailed literary analysis of a range of texts in multiple genres, extensive archival research, and the acquisition of new expertise in relation to the economic factors which led to the Celtic Tiger phenomenon and subsequent financial collapse.

I am commited to expanding my research practice using creative writing methods and approaches. As an established scholar of life writing I found that it was ideologically and methodologically important to test the claims I had been making for over a decade. In other words, to put my theoretical work into practice. This work can be seen in traditional academic publications, such as my chapter ‘Writing Memoir’ in Research Methodologies for Auto/Biography Studies (Routledge, 2019) and in more public facing outlets, including the Washington Post and BBC Radio 4.

Research links