Joe Cleary appointed John M. Schiff Professor of English
Joe Cleary, one of Ireland’s most distinguished literary critics, was recently appointed the John M. Schiff Professor of English, effective immediately.
He is a member of Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) in the Department of English.
Cleary is well-known for his ambitious and groundbreaking work on wide-ranging topics that include Irish modernism, literary theory, national literatures and partition, modernist world literatures, and postcolonial literatures.
His most recent books are “Modernism, Empire, World Literature” (2021) and “The Irish Expatriate Novel in Late Capitalist Globalization” (2021). “Modernism, Empire, World Literature” examines how Irish and American writers transformed the London- and Paris-centered world literary system in the period after World War I. “The Irish Expatriate Novel in Late Capitalist Globalization” examines how Irish writers have engaged with the wider world beyond Ireland in the post-Cold War era in the contexts of a shift of the center of gravity of the Anglophone world literary system from England to the United States and the contemporary rise of China. The book was awarded the American Conference for Irish Studies Robert Rhodes prize for books on Irish Literature in 2022. Earlier, Cleary wrote on national literatures and partition in
“Literature, Partition and the Nation-State: Culture and Conflict in Ireland, Israel and Palestine” (2002) and on 19th- and 20th-century Irish literary, cinematic, and music cultures in “Outrageous Fortune: Capital and Culture in Modern Ireland” (2007).
His edited volumes include “The Cambridge Companion to Irish Modernism” (2014), “The Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture” (2005), and three special issues of journals. Cleary is currently working on a new volume on the transformation of modern Irish culture, tentatively titled “Six Revolutions: Modern Irish Culture and Society from the Great Famine to Climate Change.”
Cleary is a distinguished citizen of the university. He has served on the Humanities Division Graduate Studies Doctoral Reform Committee, the Yale College Executive Committee, the Undergraduate Studies Committee, and the Honor and Prizes Committee. In his previous employment at NUI Maynooth, Ireland, he served as acting chair of the Department of English (2006-2007), MA coordinator (2005-06), and director of postgraduate studies in the English Department (2003-2004).
A sought-after speaker on Irish modernism, literature, and culture, Cleary has been an invited speaker at the University of Almeira, Spain; Trinity College Dublin; Maynooth University; Williams College; University of Pennsylvania; University of Kent; St. John’s College, Cambridge, and numerous other institutions. Currently, Cleary serves on editorial boards for the Irish University Review, College English, The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Critique, and International Journal of Comparative Literature and Translation Studies, and he has served as reader for Yale University Press, Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Cork University Press, and Edinburgh University Press.
At Yale, Cleary’s undergraduate and graduate classes include “The Irish Revival and Modernism,” “Novels of Education and Formation,” “The Modernist Novel in the 1920s,” “Modernism, Empire, World Crisis, 1980-1950,” “Irish and Irish-American Modernism,” “Imperial and Anti-Imperial Writing,” and “Western Marxist and Postcolonial Cultural Theory” He has also mentored dozens of graduate students in English.
He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth, and a Ph.D. at Columbia University.
