Committee Members – 2022

We are pleased to introduce you to members of the MSI Committee for this calendar year. We are always welcoming new members and contributions, great or small – if you would like to get involved with MSI, feel free to contact us by emailing modstudiesireland@gmail.com or by using the contact form.

Adrian Paterson

Adrian Paterson is Lecturer in English at the National University of Ireland, Galway. He has published widely on eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth century literature from pianos to poems, with a particular interest in the artistic interactions of modernism and Irish literature. Co-editor (with Tom Walker and Charles Armstrong) of the forthcoming Edinburgh Companion to W.B. Yeats and the Arts, and with Christine Reynier two special editions of the E-rea journal on Modernist Non-Fiction, he is director of the Yeats Thoor Ballylee Society and currently President of Modernist Studies Ireland.

Tiana Fischer

Tiana is an IRC-funded Postgraduate Scholar at the English Department at NUIG. She read for a joint BA degree in Political Theory, History of Ideas, and English Philology at the University of Goettingen, Germany, & Trinity College, Dublin, which she completed with Distinction in 2016. Tiana went on to obtain her DAAD-funded MLitt degree with Distinction at the University of St Andrews in 2017. Her research interests span 20th & 21st-century avant-garde literature, modernist media studies, twentieth-century thought, theories of aesthetics & mediation, Neoplatonism, & phenomenology. Tiana’s PhD thesis investigates theories of mediation in the context of ‘revisionary aesthetics’ in sui generis literary artworks by W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, & Walter Benjamin. Aside from this, she breathes, lives, & floats on the experimental theory-saturated poetic practices of various contemporary women poets.

Gaby Fletcher

Gaby is an IRC Postgraduate Scholar in the English Department of NUI Galway. She received her MA and BA from Oxford Brookes University. Her PhD thesis explores the shared connections and responses between Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, and Djuna Barnes to narratives of the New Woman, White Slave, and Birth Control in America. Gaby’s research interests include the comic “Fluffy Ruffles”, periodical culture, and women writers. 

Melinda Szűts

Melinda is a recent graduate of the O’Donoghue Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance, NUI Galway. She is a graduate of Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest (BA in English and Film Studies, MA in English Literature). Her Irish Research Council Postgraduate Award PhD project is entitled ‘Yeats the Dramaturge: Space Dramaturgy in Four Plays for Dancers’. Her research interests include twentieth century Irish drama and theatre, Yeats Studies, Shakespeare Studies, theories of space and space, and theatre history. Melinda is founding member and acting head of the Hungarian Yeats Society, next to being MSI’s assistant project manager.

Chris McCann

Chris is an Irish Research Council Postgraduate Award student at NUI Galway in the School of English and Creative Arts. His research project analyses the use of music as a device for exploring social hierarchies within twentieth-century Irish prose literature in both the English and Irish languages. Chris’s wider research interests lie in word and music studies, literary translation, and the coalescence of visual and aural art forms in prose literature. He completed his MA, entitled Singing Exile: Music in Irish Emigration Literature, at The University of Notre Dame Fremantle in Western Australia in 2017. Chris is MSI’s Media and Publications manager.

Casey Lawrence

Casey is a PhD candidate at Trinity College Dublin in the School of English. She completed both her BA (English Literature, double minor in French and German) and MA (English) at Brock University in Canada with First Class honours and is funded in her postgraduate studies by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). Her research interests include queer theory, feminist readings, gender studies, drag and contemporary queer culture(s), Irish writing, Canadian literature, intersectionality, post-colonialism, and disability studies, alongside Modernism. Her thesis, “‘The New Womanly Man’: Crossdressing and gender inversion in Joyce and his contemporaries,” is supervised by Dr. Sam Slote. Casey convenes MSI’s weekly Finnegans Wake Reading Group Zoom.