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Our People

Prof Tara Stubbs

Fellow, Official Fellow

Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature

Faculty of English

MA (Cantab), MSt, DPhil, PGDiplathe (Oxon)

tara.stubbs@kellogg.ox.ac.uk

Professor Stubbs came to Kellogg and OUDCE from St Peter’s College, Oxford. She works on modernist poetry and fiction, with particular interests in Irish and American literature. The author of American Literature and Irish Culture, 1910-1955: the politics of enchantment (MUP: 2013), which was re-issued in paperback in 2017, in 2020 Professor Stubbs published her second monograph entitled The Modern Irish Sonnet: revision and rebellion (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).

Professor Stubbs is also interested more generally in questions of transatlantic exchange. She set up the Oxford English Faculty’s ‘Transatlantic Literature in Context’ seminar, which ran between 2012 and 2015. This led to an essay collection, Navigating the Transnational in Modern American Literature and Culture: Axes of Influence (March 2017; paperback 2020), co-edited with Doug Haynes and including her own chapter on ‘W B Yeats in Contemporary American Poetry and Song’.

Recent publications include: an article on the American modernist poet Marianne Moore and England for a special issue of Modernist Cultures (March 2016), ed. David Barnes; ‘”Beyond the lines of poetry”: Ethnic Traditions and Imaginative Interventions in Irish-American Poetics’, a survey article for Oxford Handbooks Online (February 2017); ‘T. S. Eliot, 1922, and Transatlantic Culture’ for The London Magazine (August/September 2017); a chapter on the contemporary poet Richard Murphy’s sonnet sequence The Price of Stone for a new collection on Murphy, edited by Ben Keatinge (Cork UP, 2019); a chapter on Moore and the dictionary, in Poetry and the Dictionary, ed. Andrew Blades and Piers Pennington (2020). Forthcoming publications will be discussing the idea of ‘Hiberno-American blandness’ in contemporary Irish-American film and drama for a new book on Global Irishness, ed. Coilin Parsons (CUP); and will focus on the Irish-American trajectory of Sean O’Casey’s plays for a new critical book on O’Casey edited by James Moran (also CUP). Professor Stubbs’s new wider project is on the place of poetry in the public sphere, and grows out of her public engagement project on ‘Poetry and Structure’.

Professor Stubbs is also the Book Reviews editor for the journal International Yeats Studies. Between 2017 and 2020, she served as the Academic Programme Director for Oxford’s Rothermere American Institute, with whom she continues to be associated as a Senior Fellow.

For OUDCE, Professor Stubbs teaches on the Foundation Certificate in English Literature, gives weekly classes on Irish and American literature, and runs the Creative Writing and English Literature summer schools in alternate years. She alternates Director of Studies duties in English Literature and Creative Writing with Professor Sandie Byrne. For the English Faculty, Professor Stubbs acts as a supervisor and assessor for BA, M.St. and DPhil dissertations in topics including twentieth-century Irish poetry and drama, American modernism and poetry and poetics.

For Kellogg Professor Stubbs sits on Governing Body.