Dr Richard Barlow
Associate Lecturer
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). He runs the Elucidation of Complications Finnegans Wake website with the University of St Andrews Research Computing Team.
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.
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. He will be giving a lecture on Joyce at the 2026 Scottish Universities’ International Summer School at the University of Edinburgh.
Dr Barlow is an Assessment Board member for the Research Ireland / Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholarship and Postdoctoral Fellowship programmes. He is also a peer reviewer for Irish University Review and James Joyce Quarterly.