Bryan Radley

Profile

Biography

Bryan Radley is a Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature, and Deputy Head of Department. His research focuses on Irish literature, humour studies, and modern and contemporary fiction. His work examines a wide range of Irish authors, including James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, Samuel Beckett, Molly Keane, Jennifer Johnston, John Banville, Colm Tóibín, Sebastian Barry, Ronan Bennett, and Sam Thompson. Currently, he has three research projects under contract with Cambridge University Press: an invited essay on Bowen’s comedy; a chapter on Banville’s essays and lectures; a 150,000-word collection on John Banville in Context, which includes a substantial introduction written with his co-editor, Dr Nick Taylor-Collins. He teaches widely across the curriculum, with an emphasis on 20th- and 21st-century Irish, British, and American writing. He offers a popular advanced option on Irish comic fiction called So Funny it Hurts, for example, and frequently convenes The Age of Extremes, a large team-taught module on British and Irish literature. He has received a Vice-Chancellor’s Teaching Award, as well as frequent nominations across six award categories in the YUSU Excellence Awards, including being Highly Commended for Supervisor of the Year.

Bryan has served on the English Departmental Management Team for the majority of his time at York, including as Deputy Head of Department to Prof Jennie Batchelor and Prof Helen Smith. Other multi-year departmental officer roles include Chair of Admissions Committee, Programme Leader for the BA in English and History (the department’s largest combined course), and Semesterisation and Modularisation Lead. At university level, he has been a Mentor for the York Learning and Teaching Award and the Royal Literary Fund Fellow Coordinator. His programme design leadership runs from the York Pedagogy (in which he conceived a large period module), through the coordination of several major programme modifications with Faculty Learning and Teaching Group and the Academic Quality Team (including the department’s revised Stage 2 undergraduate model from 2025/26), to overall responsibility for restructuring all English undergraduate programmes during the university’s move to a common modular credit value within a semesterised academic year. Beyond the university, he is a member of the English and Cultural Studies research subject cluster for the White Rose College of the Arts and Humanities (WRoCAH), and a University of Lincoln External Accreditor for the BA in English and History Studies at UCNL. He is the recipient of a Rewarding Excellence Award and is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (Advance HE).

Bryan studied English Literature and Philosophy at Trinity College Dublin before coming to York to do an MA in Modern and Contemporary Literature and Culture, which was followed by a doctoral thesis on comedy in Banville’s fiction. The PhD was supervised by Prof Hugh Haughton, funded by a York Partner Studentship in association with Johns Hopkins University Press, and examined by Prof Derek Attridge and Prof Derek Hand. He also worked with Prof Lawrence Rainey for five years at Modernism/modernity, initially as the journal’s Reviews Editor and then as Managing Editor. 

Research

Overview

Bryan is an active member of the Modern School and the interdisciplinary Centre for Modern Studies. His research interests focus on Irish writing, humour, and modern and contemporary fiction. 

Bryan’s long-standing interest in the award-winning Irish novelist John Banville has led to several publications – including a 2010 Nordic Irish Studies article on Banville’s comedy of cruelty, a 2019 Irish University Review article on the comic uncanny in Eclipse, and a well-received interview collected in 2020’s Conversations with John Banville (ed. Earl G. Ingersoll and John Cusatis, University Press of Mississippi) – plus a monograph in progress on John Banville’s Comic Universe. He has also worked on other modern and contemporary Irish writers such as James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, Samuel Beckett, Molly Keane, Jennifer Johnston, Colm Tóibín, Sebastian Barry, Ronan Bennett, and Sam Thompson. With Peter Fifield and the late Lawrence Rainey, he guest-edited a 270-page special issue of Modernism/modernity entitled Samuel Beckett: Out of the Archive, for example, and he has recently contributed an essay and video script for York’s ‘Reading James Joyce’ MOOC. Currently, he has three research projects under contract with Cambridge University Press: an invited essay on comedy in Bowen; a chapter on Banville’s essays and lectures; a 150,000-word collection on John Banville in Context, which includes a substantial introductory essay written with his co-editor, Nick Taylor-Collins. Away from Irish Studies, he is also writing an article about the influential American writer Mary Robison’s fragmentary fiction, which builds on an invited lecture he gave at University College Dublin. 

Bryan has co-organised three international conferences at York, including Fugitive Ideas with James Williams. This 2018 symposium in honour of Hugh Haughton combined public events at the Humanities Research Centre with invited papers from high-profile literary scholars on aesthetics, Irish literature, translation, and poetics. As well as contributing to European scholarly societies on Irish literature such as BAIS, EFACIS, and NISN, he is an active member of IASIL, the leading global organisation for Irish Studies. He convened a special session on ‘John Banville’s Criticism’ at Trinity College Dublin during IASIL 2019: The Critical Ground, for example. With Matt Campbell, Emilie Morin, and Ríona Nic Congáil, Bryan also brought the society’s prestigious annual conference to York; IASIL 2015: Reconciliations featured four keynote lectures and over 130 papers, as well as interviews and readings that attracted a large audience from beyond the university. Other public engagement and impact activities include curating the inaugural event of the first York Festival of Ideas – a major exhibition of the photographer John Minihan’s portraits, which formed part of Samuel Beckett: Out of the Archive, one of the largest events ever hosted by York English – and public interviews with the distinguished Irish novelist Jennifer Johnston and the Belfast-based novelist, academic, and children’s writer Sam Thompson for Writers at York. He also ran a two-year CModS research strand on Creative Dissonance: Writing Now with Alexandra Kingston-Reese, and has chaired a roundtable interview on New Irish Writing with Lucy Caldwell, Jan Carson, and Yan Ge for the Ilkley Literature Festival. He reviews for publications such as The Cambridge Quarterly, The Conversation, and The Humorous Times.

Supervision

Bryan has supervised postgraduate researchers (PGRs) to successful completion on a wide range of subjects, including Irish writing, comedy, and 20th- and 21st-century literature and culture writ large. He currently supervises eight PhDs and is the thesis advisor for a further five doctoral projects, as well as being a regular examiner for York MA by Research and PhD candidates. He is a member of the English and Cultural Studies research subject cluster for the White Rose College of the Arts and Humanities (WRoCAH). Several of Bryan’s supervisees have been awarded full funding, including through WRoCAH AHRC Open Competition Studentships. He also has a track record of supporting PGRs to International Fellowship success, including as AHRC International Placement Scheme Fellows at the Harry Ransom Center and the Huntington Library. He holds a Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice and has been Highly Commended for Supervisor of the Year in the YUSU Excellence Awards. He is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (Advance HE).

Bryan warmly welcomes enquiries from potential postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers, including those with proposals on the following topics:

• Irish Literature and Culture, including Irish diasporic literature
• Contemporary Fiction 
• Humour Studies, including Comedy and the Novel, Stage Comedy and Tragicomedy, Screen Comedy (e.g. sitcoms and dramedy), Stand-up Comedy, Theories of Humour (e.g. aesthetic, ethical, and wider philosophical considerations)
• Modernist, Interwar, and Mid-Century Writing
• Genre Fiction, including in computer games, film, and television (e.g. crime writing, detective fiction, and noir / neo-noir; dystopian and post-apocalyptic narratives; espionage novels; Gothic; science fiction and speculative fiction) 
• Creative-Critical projects (e.g. English with Creative Writing)

Teaching

Undergraduate

Bryan’s teaching portfolio encompasses a diverse range of undergraduate and postgraduate modules: first-year survey modules; cohort-wide theoretical modules; an interdisciplinary bridge module; period-based intermediate option modules; five research-led, advanced option modules; two core modules and an option module at MA level; research student training programmes. His teaching design leadership runs from the York Pedagogy (in which he conceived a large period module), through the coordination of several major programme modifications with Faculty Learning and Teaching Group and the Academic Quality Team (including the revised English Stage 2 undergraduate model from 2025/26), to overall responsibility for restructuring all six English undergraduate programmes during semesterisation and modularisation.

Having convened, lectured, and taught on ‘British and Irish Literature, 1910 to the Present’ for many years, Bryan was responsible for designing the large, team-taught Intermediate Option Module, ‘The Age of Extremes: Twentieth-Century British and Irish Literature’. As Programme Leader for English and History, he also successfully redesigned the interdisciplinary ‘Texts & Histories’ bridge module. His Advanced Option Modules include the popular ‘So Funny It Hurts: Irish Comic Fiction’.

Postgraduate

Bryan is a regular contributor to ‘Postgraduate Life in Practice’, the core training and skills module for all MA students, and ‘Reading Modernity’, the core module for the MA in Modern and Contemporary Literature and Culture. He has also co-taught ‘The Novel Now’ option module.

Bryan holds a Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice and is an academic mentor for the York Learning and Teaching Award. YLTA is an MA-level programme that supports Graduate Teaching Assistants from across the university to reflect on and develop their teaching practice. He regularly offers lectures and skills sessions for postgraduate researchers, including on editorial practice and journal publishing.

Bryan has extensive experience of supervising postgraduates writing dissertations and theses. He welcomes enquiries from MA students and MRes and PhD researchers interested in twentieth- and twenty-first century literature and culture, including topics related to modern and contemporary fiction, texts from Ireland and its diaspora, humour studies, and genre fiction, as well as creative-critical projects.