Conor McCarthy

Conor McCarthy is Senior Lecturer in English at Maynooth University. After schooling in Ireland and Canada, he took his BA in English and Sociology at Trinity College Dublin (1989), his Master’s Degree in English at University College Dublin (1991) and his D.Phil. in English at Sussex (1996). He is the author of Modernisation, Crisis and Culture in Ireland 1969 - 1992 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000), and The Cambridge Introduction to Edward Said (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).   

 Conor won one of the first Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Research Fellowships, which he held from 2000 to 2002 at NUI Galway. He has lectured in universities in Ireland, Britain, France, Italy, Canada, the United States, Austria, Croatia, Slovenia and in the Middle East. He is Associate Editor of College Literature and Second Year Co-Ordinator in the Maynooth University English Department.

Conor has long developed intellectual and political expertise both within and beyond the academy.  This work centres around the value of scholarship as a public good in itself but also on the vocation of the critical intellectual, who produces major research while seeking to put his/her expertise in the service of wider publics and constituencies beyond the academy.   Accordingly, Conor seeks to work as a scholar-activist.  He is a founder-member of the Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign, and of Academics for Palestine, which campaigns for the academic boycott of Israeli higher education institutions.  Through those organisations, and many other forms of research, cultural and outreach activities, Conor has helped shape discussion of the Palestine question in Ireland over the last two decades.   He is also a veteran member and participant in the work of the Red Stripe Marxist collective and seminar.   Conor's interest in and sympathy with the Marxist tradition issued most notably in the 2018 '(Re-)Birth of Marx(-ism)' conference, held to recognise the bicentenary of Marx's birth.   This international event, conceived and co-organised by Conor, was the largest humanities or social science conference held at Maynooth University for many years.

As well as two monographs and two edited volumes, Conor has published articles, essays and reviews on literature, criticism and cultural politics in the Yearbook of English Studies, Interventions, Textual Practice, the Irish University Review, the Irish Literary Supplement, Eire-Ireland, the Journal of Palestine Studies, the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Wasafiri, College Literature, The Citizen, Current Writing, the Dublin Review of Books, the Los Angeles Review of Books and the Field Day Review. Conor has also written and reviewed for The Irish Times and The Sunday Business Post, as well as publishing political essays and reviews with Electronic Intifada, Jacobin, Jadaliyya, Mondoweiss and the Irish Left Review.  Conor's work has been translated into German and Italian.

Conor has supervised doctoral research on the twentieth century Irish novel, on the importance of Nietzsche to the great Irish modernists, and on the counter-revolutionary character of Irish fiction in the era of the Free State.    He welcomes research proposals in these areas, as well as in the history of Irish political thought, Western Marxism, postcolonialism, and twentieth century Irish culture.

Conor's Google Scholar page: ‪Conor McCarthy McCarthy‬ - ‪Google Scholar‬

Conor has kept a blog since 2012: reflectionsfromdamagedlife.blogspot.com   Views expressed there are his alone.