Catherine Flynn received her PhD in Comparative Literature at Yale University in 2009. Before studying English and philosophy in University College Cork, she qualified as an architect at University College Dublin and practiced for two years in Vienna, Austria. Her research interests include modernist, proto-modernist, and avant-garde works, literary and critical theory, Irish and Anglo-Irish literature, and film. She has taught seminars on James Joyce’s Ulysses and the epic tradition, on the novel from Jane Austen to Ha Jin, and on theories of urban experience. She is currently working on a book manuscript, Street Things: Transformations of Experience in the Modern City, which traces the development of city writing in which an increased sense of social fragmentation coincides with a new focus on the relations between people and things. The project reads Ulysses alongside Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, considering Joyce’s novel in an unconventional context that ranges from nineteenth century realist fiction to twentieth century surrealist works. She is also developing a project on Irish polyglot modernism during the Second World War.
Sweet Hall
Second Floor, MC 3068
IHUM Fellow: Catherine Flynn, PhD