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Professor Tara Stubbs

Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature

Director of Studies in English Literature, Creative Writing and Film

Chair of the MSt in Creative Writing

Co-Director of the Creative Writing Summer School and English Literature Summer School

tara.stubbs@conted.ox.ac.uk

https://demystifyingpoetry.site.ox.ac.uk/home

Prof. Stubbs came to the Department in 2012, following four years lecturing at St. Peter’s College, Oxford. Along with Prof. Sandie Byrne, she was the first woman appointed to full Professor at the Department in 2023. Her interests include poetry and form, Irish and Irish-American literature, and literary modernism; and she is passionate about making the study and discussion of literature accessible to all. She is the author of two monographs, American Literature and Irish Culture, 1910-1955: the politics of enchantment (MUP, 2013), and The Modern Irish Sonnet (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). She has written a wide variety of articles, chapters and pamphlets on issues within Irish and American writing, and she co-edited the collection Navigating the Transnational in Modern American Literature and Culture (2017, with Doug Haynes). Her third book underscores a new research focus; discussing the representation of Endometriosis in literature, it will be written from the perspective of living with the under-researched chronic condition.

Prof. Stubbs has been the recipient of a Nominated Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) at the University of Edinburgh (2021), a British Academy Innovation Fellowship (2023-6), and an Oxford Humanities Research Fund award (2026). She has also acted as the Book Reviews Editor for the peer-reviewed international journal International Yeats Studies since 2016. She has given invited and plenary lectures to audiences in the UK, Ireland and the US.

Prof. Stubbs believes that no concept is too abstract that it can’t be taught with clarity and concision. She believes that there are no silly questions, and that all students have an equal voice in the classroom. Her classes are commended for being encouraging environments in which everyone feels included and confident to express themselves. She believes in the importance of the Humanities, now more than ever, as it equips us with critical thinking, accurate expression and understanding of others’ opinions and beliefs.

Prof. Stubbs values working with mature students, due to the breadth of experience and knowledge they bring to their studies. She has recently worked with DPhil students looking at mid-twentieth century American poetry, contemporary Irish fiction, Irish poetry, and Black British and African-American music and poetry. She welcomes approaches from students interested in studying any of these topics, or who would like to think about issues around women’s pain and its representation in literature.

In recent years, Prof. Stubbs has been the recipient of a British Academy Innovation Fellowship (2023-6) on ‘Demystifying Poetry’, which includes 2 series of a popular podcast, and a website. The project worked with educators, poets and the public to find ways of making poetry more accessible and enjoyable. During this period, she has also written articles, a pamphlet and book chapters on subjects including: US poetry, sonnets by Black American writers, the playwright Sean O’Casey’s work in the US, and issues in Irish-American literary culture.

Prof Stubbs has recently begun researching the representation of women’s health in memoir, fiction and poetry. Her next book will be a creative-critical study of Endometriosis in literature, which looks from a personal perspective at how women’s pain is represented in fiction, poetry and memoir; and asks what this can tell us about how culture deals with and manages ‘women’s issues’. An additional research interest considers the representation of the ‘only child’ in literature and culture, including a research group (the ‘Bristol-Oxford Only Child’ (‘BOOC’) Group); a study of the representation of the only child in mid-twentieth century British sculpture; and a series of linked talks.

Website and podcast: Demystifying Poetry (2024-6): https://demystifyingpoetry.site.ox.ac.uk/home
Article: ‘Peripatetic poetry: (un-)generous tributes and (un-)endings in Leontia Flynn, Elizabeth Bishop, and W.B. Yeats’, Bishop–Lowell Studies (2025) 5: 43–69.
Book chapter: ‘Onstage in the USA’, in Sean O’Casey in Context, ed. James Moran (Cambridge: CUP, 2025), pp.297-307.
Book chapter: ‘Irish Literature, (Irish-) American Culture, and “Hiberno-American Blandness”’, in Transnationalism in Irish Literature and Culture, ed. Cóilín Parsons (Cambridge: CUP, 2025), pp.207-224.
Pamphlet: ‘Transgressing into poetry’: Nationality, Gender and Sexuality in Sonnets from Scotland by Edwin Morgan (1984) and The Price of Stone by Richard Murphy (1985), IASH Edinburgh (2024): https://www.iash.ed.ac.uk/sites/default/files/Transgressing%20Into%20Poetry%202024%20for%20web.pdf
Monograph: The Modern Irish Sonnet: Revision and Rebellion (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).
Edited Collection: Stubbs and Hayes, eds., Navigating the Transnational in Modern American Literature and Culture (London and NY: Routledge, 2017).
Monograph: American Literature and Irish Culture, 1910-1955: the politics of enchantment (Manchester: MUP, 2013).
For details of all of her publications to date, see Prof. Stubbs’s English Faculty profile: https://www.english.ox.ac.uk/people/professor-tara-stubbs