Dr Jonathan Gallagher
I am an early career scholar and teacher of European literature and history. With the award of an AHRC scholarship, I completed my doctoral studies in 2019 at the University of Edinburgh, where my research focused on the relationship between poetry, politics, and social change in early modern England. My research is highly interdisciplinary in approach, combining formalist literary analysis with perspectives drawn from contemporary political theory, theology, and history. My publications to date chart the ways that changing class relations and practices of rule in 17C England affected different modes of religious literature and experience. This research, on John Donne and George Herbert, has appeared in Modern Philology and Studies in Philology, two of the leading academic journals in my field. In 2020/21, I was an Early Career Fellow at the London Renaissance Seminar, Birkbeck College, University of London. I used this time to begin revising my doctoral thesis for publication as a book, provisionally entitled Ungodded England: A Study of State-formation and Religious Poetry. Along with my work on Donne and Herbert, Ungodded England will feature chapters on reason and revolution in Paradise Lost, and new work on Restoration politics and John Dryden’s The Hind and the Panther.
I have taught several courses, across multiple historical periods, at the University of Edinburgh. These ranged from Medieval and Early Modern Literature, to Romantic, Modernist and Late-Modernist literature and Drama. In my teaching, as in my research, I'm drawn to examining intellectual history and literary art in the context of given social and political conditions. Moreover, having become an early modernist by way of getting to grips with certain currents in modernist and late-modernist poetry, in the course of my doctoral studies I have acquired teaching and research interests in classical literature and its influence upon European writers of the renaissance and early modern periods.
In 2022 I founded Notes to Literature, which will aim to make courses with qualified early career scholars available to the wider public.
My Story
I'm a writer, researcher and teacher living between London, England and Granada, Spain. I grew up in Derry, Ireland, studied English Literature at the great University of Sussex, and, with the help of AHRC funding, undertook my Masters and Doctoral studies at the University of Edinburgh.
My literary and research interests have branched out over time. My earliest love was for modernist literature and politics — or the Modern European Mind, as one memorable course put it. Nietzsche, Marx, Joyce and Beckett above all.
Contact
I'm always looking for new and exciting opportunities. Let's connect.