Dr Richard Barlow
Associate Lecturer in Scottish Literature
Biography
Richard Alan Barlow (@richardalanbarlow.bsky.social) is an Associate Lecturer at the University of St Andrews, an elected member of the Board of Trustees of the International James Joyce Foundation, and a former Academic Director of the Trieste Joyce School. He received his MA and MLitt from the University of Aberdeen and his PhD from Queen’s University Belfast. As an undergradute, he spent an academic year at Università degli Studi di Trieste. He has taught in Belfast and in Singapore.
Richard's most recent book - Modern Irish and Scottish Literature: Connections, Contrasts, Celticisms - was published by Oxford University Press in 2023. His first book, The Celtic Unconscious: Joyce and Scottish Culture, was published by University of Notre Dame Press in 2017. He has also edited, with Paul Fagan, a collection titled Finnegans Wake - Human and Nonhuman Histories (Edinburgh University Press, 2024).
The Celtic Unconscious examines the application of Scottish Enlightenment philosophy in Finnegans Wake, it investigates Joyce’s interest in links between Irish and Scottish histories, and it analyses Joyce’s interest in Scottish culture (especially the work of David Hume, James Macpherson, Robert Burns, James Hogg, and Robert Louis Stevenson).
Modern Irish and Scottish Literature explores thematic and intertextual links between major writers of modern Irish and Scottish literature from Macpherson's Ossian onwards, and studies the work of Sydney Owenson, Augusta Gregory, Fiona Macleod, W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, Hugh MacDiarmid, Samuel Beckett, Sorley MacLean, and Seamus Heaney.
Finnegans Wake - Human and Nonhuman Histories is a collection of essays by a group of world-leading scholars on Joyce’s final, most ambitious text. The collection focuses on how Joyce created new ways of representing the histories of human societies by foregrounding their interdependencies with the environment, animal life, and technology. The chapters are informed by a variety of approaches and contexts, that range from the blue humanities and ecofeminism to psychoanalysis and labour studies, and which draw on the work of thinkers such as Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Giorgio Agamben, Donna J. Haraway, and Jane Bennett.
Dr Barlow has published articles in journals such as Irish Studies Review, James Joyce Quarterly, Philosophy and Literature, and Scottish Literary Review. He has written for the Irish Times and the Guardian and is contributing to a number of forthcoming volumes, including the Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Scottish Literature and the Bloomsbury Handbook to Joyce. He also has work forthcoming with European Joyce Studies. His research is informed by genetic criticism, ecocriticism, postcolonial theory, Marxist literary criticism, and gender studies. In addition to the writers mentioned above, Dr Barlow has published research on Flann O’Brien and Dion Boucicault. He is currently collaborating with the St Andrews Research Computing team on a Finnegans Wake digital humanities project.
Richard gave a keynote presentation at the XXIX International James Joyce Symposium, held at the University of Glasgow in 2024. Richard has also been an invited speaker at the Trieste Joyce School and the Vienna Irish Studies and Cultural Theory Summer School. He has given invited lectures at the James Joyce Centre in Dublin, the University of Aberdeen, the University of Dundee, the University of Edinburgh, the University of Glasgow, and the University of Oxford.
Dr Barlow is an Assessment Board member for the Irish Research Council / Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholarship and Postdoctoral Fellowship programmes. He is also a peer reviewer for Irish University Review and James Joyce Quarterly.