Biography
I completed my BA in European Studies at Trinity College, Dublin, graduating with First-class honours. Reading French and Russian languages, as well as European history, politics and philosophy, I transitioned to literary studies later in my degree, thence taking an MPhil with distinction in European, Latin American Comparative Literatures and Cultures at Homerton College, Cambridge. I also hold an honorary Vice-Chancellor's Award.
My undergraduate work focused on the politics of cultural and linguistic hybridity in Samuel Beckett's post-war novellas, a study which drew extensively on Theodor Adorno's analysis of modernism in Aesthetic Theory. My MPhil thesis subsequently looked at representations of bodily individuation through textual form in Louis-Ferdinand Céline's celebrated novel, Voyage au bout de la nuit, via a number of critical and theoretical frameworks – Bataille, Deleuze, Simondon, and Foucault.
My doctoral research will reprise my interest in Céline, taking as its point of departure Nietzschean aesthetics. More specifically, drawing on the German philosopher's seminal text, The Birth of Tragedy, I aim to foreground ontological affirmation as a product of the reader's exteroceptive encounter with textual form and rhythm in Céline's oeuvre, as well as the incongruous relationship this experience of affirmation has vis-à-vis a thematics of pervasive misanthropy. This will entail a broader dialogue with Céline's theoretical works, in particular those pertaining to music and dance.
Other academic interests
These include: the relationship between politics and literary form, especially in and through bilingualism and the literature of exile; the Frankfurt School; the scientific worldview and its coinciding with philosophical pessimism in literary texts; technology and contemporary accounts of subjectivity; the representation of bodies in textual form; the Humanities in contemporary academia.
