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Staff Profile

Dr Meiko O'Halloran

Senior Lecturer in Romantic Literature

  • Email: meiko.o'halloran@ncl.ac.uk
  • Telephone: +44 (0) 191 208 7759
  • Fax: +44 (0) 191 208 8708
  • Address: School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics,
    Percy Building,
    Newcastle University,
    Newcastle upon Tyne,
    NE1 7RU
Background


I joined Newcastle University as a Lecturer in Romantic Literature in 2006, after completing my doctoral and Masters work at Oxford University, and holding a stipendiary lectureship in English Literature at Corpus Christi College, Oxford.

In addition to teaching and supervising research projects on Romantic-era literature at the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, I am a Teaching Mentor (also known as a Faculty Programme Liaison Officer) for the HaSS Faculty.  


Qualifications

BA (Hons) English Literature - UCL
MPhil - University of Oxford
DPhil - University of Oxford


Memberships

British Association for Romantic Studies,

The Keats Foundation,

Keats-Shelley Association of America,

North American Society for the Study of Romanticism, 

North East Forum in Eighteenth-Century and Romantic Studies (co-convenor)


Research

Research Interests

My expertise is in British and Scottish Romanticism. My research is particularly engaged with the role and self-fashioning of the poet in the Romantic period and Romantic poets’ responses to their epic forefathers. 

My first monograph, James Hogg and British Romanticism: A Kaleidoscopic Art (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), argues that Hogg's kaleidoscopic literary practice unsettles and reshapes our canonical understanding of the Romantic period and his place in it.

My current book project focuses on Keats’s rethinking of the epic genre in dialogue with pastoral and epic traditions and Romantic experimentations with the epic.

My other research interests include national identity, labouring-class poetry, imagined places, utopianism, Romantic-era fiction, the Gothic, canon-making, parodies, and early nineteenth-century periodical culture.   

 

Recent Work

My recent work includes two articles on Keats and Milton: 'Reawakening Lycidas: Keats, Milton, and Epic', in Review of English Studies (2020), and ‘‘Patient Travail’: Keats and Samson Agonistes’, in a special issue of Romanticism in honour of Michael O'Neill, ed. by Sarah Wootton (April 2022).

My other work on Keats includes two book chapters, one on 'Keats at Burns's Grave' for John Keats and Romantic Scotland, ed. by Katie Garner and Nicholas Roe (OUP, 2022), and another on 'Poetic Genealogies: Keats's Northern Walking Tour' in Keats's Places, ed. by Richard Marggraf Turley (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

You can hear me as one of the contributors to Fiona Stafford’s BBC 3 radio documentary, ‘Keats Goes North’, talking about Keats’s walking tour of the Lake District and Scotland in the summer of 1818.

My essay, ‘Kaleidoscopic Romanticism’, features in the ‘50 Voices’ project, in a special issue of Keats-Shelley Journal, 68 (2019).

 

Current Research

I am working on two book projects. The first focuses on Keats and Epic. The second (longer-term) project, 'Re-figuring the Role of the Poet: the Romantic Poets and their Legacy', examines the ways in which poets such as Coleridge, Shelley, Hogg, Keats, and Byron re-defined the social role and relevance of the poet, responding to an epic tradition, and using imagined other-world spaces to interrogate and explore the socio-political and artistic concerns of their day.   

 

Postgraduate Supervision

I am currently supervising a PhD on Romantic Poet-Critics, a PhD on Fiction, Romantic Biography, and Byron at Seaham Hall, and two MLitt projects on Romantic literature. I welcome enquiries and applications from prospective PhD and MLitt students who are interested in working in any of my areas of research interest and expertise, particularly the work of Romantic-era poets and novelists.  

 


Teaching

Undergraduate Teaching

SEL2203 Revolutionary Britain, 1789-1832

SEL3340 Romantic Poetry: Journeys of the Imagination (Module Leader)

SEL3364 Independent Essay 1

SEL3365 Independent Essay 2

SEL3362 Dissertation in English Literature 

 

Postgraduate Teaching

I have contributed to MA teaching and supervised a number of successful MA dissertations and MLitt research degrees.


 

 

Publications