ProfessorJohn Brannigan

John Brannigan is Professor of Modern Literature at University College Dublin. His research focuses primarily on twentieth-century literatures of the Irish and British archipelagos, and on the relationship between literature and the environment. He has published seven sole-authored academic books: New Historicism and Cultural Materialism (1998), Brendan Behan (2002), Literature, Culture and Society in Postwar England, 1945-1965 (2002), Orwell to the Present: Literature in England, 1945-2000 (2003), Pat Barker (2005), Race in Modern Irish Literature and Culture (2009), and Archipelagic Modernism: Literature in the Irish and British Isles, 1890-1970 (2015). He has also edited important textual editions of George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London (2021) and A Bit of a Writer: Brendan Behan’s Collected Short Prose (2023). Since 2015, a key strand of his research has focused on pioneering and integrating humanities-based methodologies in environmental assessment, including work on cultural ecosystem services, and using the arts and humanities to understand and respond to climate change and environmental damage. This has included work on the IRC Cultural Value of Coastlines project, co-directed with Professor Tasman Crowe, and the EU MARBEFES project.