dr. C.T. Cusack (Christopher)

Chris Cusack (he/him) is Assistant Professor of English and American Literature and Culture. He mainly teaches in the English Language and Culture and American Studies BA programmes, the English track of the two-year educational MA programme, and the MA in Transatlantic Studies.

Chris has a PhD from Radboud University (cum laude), an MA (distinction) from University College London, and a BA (cum laude) also from Radboud. His PhD analysed representations of the Great Irish Famine in Irish and North American literature. Since then, his work has focused on a variety of themes and their (sometimes oblique) interconnections, including the transatlantic cultural memory of famine, local colour in transatlantic contexts, religion in Irish American writing, and the representation of death in Irish and American literature and culture. As a member of the Heritages of Hunger research group, he (co-)developed educational materials about famine for primary and secondary education. He also has an interest in apocalypticism in (contemporary) literature and culture, on which he teaches an MA course, and occasionally writes about literary pedagogy.

His work has appeared in a wide range of journals and edited books, and his first monograph is under contract with Liverpool University Press. For the same press, he has also co-edited, with Bridget English and Matthew Reznicek, a forthcoming collection of essays on corpses in modern Irish literature. With Sophie Cooper, he is putting together a special issue of Éire-Ireland on death and the Irish diaspora. He is also slowly – all too slowly – conceptualising a cultural history of the coffin.

Chris has been the recipient of multiple scholarships and awards. As a literary critic, he writes for publications such as the Irish Times, the TLS, the Irish Literary Supplement, de Nederlandse Boekengids [Dutch Review of Books], Poetry London, and Poetry Review. By night, he moonlights as a poet, with big words but only fair to middling success.