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Staff Profile

Dr Meiko O'Halloran

Senior Lecturer in Romantic Literature

  • Email: meiko.o'halloran@ncl.ac.uk
  • Telephone: +44 (0) 191 208 7759
  • Address: School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics,
    Percy Building,
    Newcastle University,
    Newcastle upon Tyne,
    NE1 7RU
Background


Roles and responsibilities

As a Senior Lecturer in Romantic Literature, I teach and supervise undergraduates and postgraduates across the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics. I am also the Employability Lead for my School, an elected member of the University Senate, and a member of Newcastle University’s INSIGHTS Public Lectures Committee.

My previous roles have included SELLL Postgraduate Research Director and MLitt DPD (2023-24), HaSS Faculty Teaching Mentor (2019-22), an elected member of the HaSS Faculty Promotions Committee (2014-17), and Senior Tutor for Undergraduates (2016-18). 


Biography

I was born and brought up in London and did my undergraduate degree in English at UCL. After completing my MPhil and DPhil degrees at Oxford University and teaching as a stipendiary lecturer in English Literature at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, I joined Newcastle University as a Lecturer in Romantic Literature in 2006. 


Qualifications

BA (Hons) English Literature - UCL

MPhil - University of Oxford

DPhil - University of Oxford





Research

Research Interests

My expertise is in British and Scottish Romanticism. My research is particularly engaged with the role and self-fashioning of the poet in the Romantic period and Romantic poets’ responses to their epic forefathers. 

My first monograph, James Hogg and British Romanticism: A Kaleidoscopic Art (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), argues that Hogg's kaleidoscopic literary practice unsettles and reshapes our canonical understanding of the Romantic period and his place in it.

My current book project focuses on Keats’s rethinking of the epic genre in dialogue with pastoral and epic traditions and Romantic experimentations with the epic.

My other research interests include national identity, labouring-class poetry, imagined places, utopianism, Romantic-era fiction, the Gothic, canon-making, parodies, and early nineteenth-century periodical culture.   

 

Recent Work

My recent work includes two articles on Keats and Milton, 'Keats's Unwritten Epic', in Review of English Studies (published online in April 2024), and ‘‘Patient Travail’: Keats and Samson Agonistes’, in a special issue of Romanticism in honour of Michael O'Neill, ed. by Sarah Wootton (2022), and a book chapter on 'Keats at Burns's Grave' in John Keats and Romantic Scotland, ed. by Katie Garner and Nicholas Roe (OUP, 2022).

My essay, ‘Kaleidoscopic Romanticism’, features in the ‘50 Voices’ project, in a special issue of Keats-Shelley Journal, 68 (2019).

You can hear me as one of the contributors to Fiona Stafford’s BBC 3 radio documentary, ‘Keats Goes North’, talking about Keats’s walking tour of the Lake District and Scotland in the summer of 1818.

 

Current Research

I am working on two book projects. The first focuses on Keats reaching for the epic. The second (longer-term) project examines the ways in which poets such as Coleridge, Shelley, Hogg, Keats, and Byron re-defined the social role and relevance of the poet, responding to an epic tradition, and using imagined other-world spaces to interrogate and explore the socio-political and artistic concerns of their day.   

 

Postgraduate Supervision

I have supervised a number of PhD and MLitt projects to successful completion and I welcome enquiries and applications from prospective postgraduate students who are interested in working in any of my areas of research interest and expertise.  

 


Teaching

Undergraduate Teaching

SEL1034 Beginnings

SEL2203 Revolutionary Britain, 1789-1832

SEL3451 Keats and Romantic Epic (Module Leader)

SEL3362 Dissertation in English Literature 



 

Postgraduate Teaching

I supervise PhDs and MLitt projects in my areas of expertise and I have also supervised a number of successful MA dissertations.


Publications