Leverhulme: Public Lecture

'Look Back in Hunger: Ireland in Famine's Wake from Munster to The Maze, or The Faerie Queene to Steve McQueen ' by Professor Willy Maley (University of Glasgow)

Professor Willy Maley is a Fellow of the English Association (FEA). He has published widely on English Renaissance Literature, from Spenser to Milton, and on aspects of early modern and modern Scottish and Irish culture, from James Joyce to Alasdair Gray. He is the author of A Spenser Chronology (1994), Salvaging Spenser: Colonialism, Culture and Identity (1997), and Nation, State and Empire in English Renaissance Literature: Shakespeare to Milton (2003). He is editor, with Andrew Hadfield, of A View of the Present State of Ireland: From the First Published Edition (1997). He has also edited five collections of essays: with Brendan Bradshaw and Andrew Hadfield, Representing Ireland: Literature and the Origins of Conflict, 1534-1660 (Cambridge University Press, 1993); with Bart Moore-Gilbert and Gareth Stanton, Postcolonial Criticism (Longman, 1997); with David J. Baker, British Identities and English Renaissance Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2002); with Andrew Murphy, Shakespeare and Scotland (Manchester University Press, 2004); and with Alex Benchimol, Spheres of Influence: Intellectual and Cultural Publics from Shakespeare to Habermas (Peter Lang, 2006).
Willy has published with Argyll Publishing, Ashgate, Barnes and Noble, Blackwell, the British Council, Cambridge Scholar’s Press, Cambridge University Press, Capercaillie Press, Clydeside Press, Continuum Press, Duquesne University Press, Edinburgh University Press, Fitzroy Dearborn, Four Courts Press, Freight Design, Greenwood Press, Longman, Manchester University Press, MIT Press, Oxford University Press, Palgrave Macmillan, Peking University Press, Peter Lang, Prentice Hall, Rodopi, Routledge, St Martin’s Press, Sulis Press, Sunderland University Press, Universitätsverlag C. Winter Press, and University of Toronto Press. His work has appeared in forty different journals and magazines, and has been translated into several languages, including Chinese and German.

Willy founded, with Philip Hobsbaum, the Creative Writing Master's at Glasgow in 1995. The course has since become one of the most successful of its kind, producing a host of published writers and prizewinners, including Anne Donovan, Rachel Seiffert and Louise Welsh.

Willy has been a Visiting Professor at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire (1997), and was the first recipient of the Gerard Manley Hopkins Visiting Professorship at John Carroll University in Cleveland (1998). Research interests range from the representation of national and colonial identities in early modern texts through to deconstruction and postcolonialism. Willy is presently working on the depiction of Britain in Milton and Shakespeare.

His own interests for postgraduate supervision are contemporary Irish and Scottish writing; creative writing; literary theory; and Renaissance literature (focusing on colonialism and national identity).