Ronan McDonald

Biography

Ronan McDonald holds the Gerry Higgins Chair of Irish Studies at the University of Melbourne. He was Director of the Global Irish Studies Centre at UNSW between 2010 and 2015. He has research interests in Irish and Irish-Australian literature, the history of criticism and the value of the humanities and has published widely in these areas. His authored books include Tragedy and Irish Literature (2002), The Cambridge Introduction to Beckett (2006), The Death of the Critic (2008) and edited volumes include The Values of Literary Studies: Critical Institutions, Scholarly Agendas (Cambridge, UP, 2015). In 2021, he c0-edited a special issue of Australian Literary Studies on ‘The Uses of Irish-Australian Literature’. He is Chief-Investigator, with Simon During on an ARC Discovery Project entitled ‘English: The History of a Discipline, 1920-70’.  He is the series editor for Cambridge Themes in Irish Literature and Culture. In 2016-17, he was the co-Director of the Yeats International Summer School. He is currently Vice- President of the Celtic Club in Melbourne.