Writer – Researcher – Lecturer

Currently: Lecturer in English (1830-present), Mansfield College, University of Oxford.

My research and teaching interests are in queer and trans studies, gender and sexuality, modern and contemporary literature and postcolonial studies.

My first book, Queering Twentieth-Century Irish Women’s Writing: Uneasy Moderns, is forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press. Bringing together a group of untimely, queerly-oriented writers — Dorothy Macardle, Kate O’Brien, Elizabeth Bowen and Molly Keane — this book disrupts common-sense narratives of modernisation, gender, sexuality and race in postcolonial Ireland. Lingering with unease and discomfort in the work of mid-twentieth-century women writers and the spaces they occupied, it pays close attention to inadmissible feelings of loss, anxiety, hauntedness and melancholia. By embracing discomfort, it moves towards a less idealising form of queer studies that is more responsive to the complexity of queer history, and offers a new story of Irish culture in the twentieth century.

I am interested in queer and radical histories, as well as oral history and site-specific methodologies. I have worked on collaborative and community research projects investigating queer history and colonial legacies in Cambridge, gendered experiences in higher education and radical history in London.

I received my PhD in Multi-disciplinary Gender Studies from the University of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies in 2023 and I have taught English at the University of Cambridge and Maynooth University.

I am always interested in hearing about potential collaborations and I welcome invitations to speak, write, chair or facilitate workshops. Feel free to get in touch at naoise.murphy@mansfield.ox.ac.uk or find me online @naoisemurphy.