This research was funded by a 2 year grant from the Irish Research Council. It asks how the effects of reading can be communicated in written form: more specifically, how women’s writing forges innovative ways of inscribing the act of reading and the experience of women readers.

My project takes a cross-genre approach to texts written in English, examining short stories, novels, poetry, and hybrid texts merging memoir, fiction, and criticism.

This work will lead to my second monograph, provisionally titled Subtle Forms.

It also informs a nascent research project on connective reading, focused on queer reading and community building.

In The Reader’s Joyce I explore critical authority and the construction of ‘the author’, rethinking accepted literary, critical, and theoretical notions of the relationships between author, reader, and text. This study approaches issues of reading by marrying close textual analysis with critical and literary reception studies: from Homeric scholars’ ideations of an unknown author to Joyceans’ critical ideations of Joyce.

The Reader’s Joyce established my interest in how literature and criticism can communicate acts of reading - which led to my current work on reading in contemporary women’s writing.

I am invested in exploring creative-critical responses to issues of reading, both through my own work and by bringing together creative-critical practitioners in an ongoing event series, Possible Forms.

This work informs a non-fiction book project, The Reading Kind, formed of a series of interlinked essays tracing reading connections and communities.

In a freelance writing consultancy role for the audiobook app Audrey, I’ve written listening guides to accompany audiobooks. This work provides me with new ways to understand and consider the activity of reading, finding innovative modes to encourage deep engagement with fiction and non-fiction.

I’ve written, recorded, and curated multimedia guides for James Joyce’s Dubliners and Katherine Mansfield’s Bliss and Other Stories.