Professor Irene Morra

Education and Qualifications

• B.A. (English Literature, Musicology, and French Literature, University of Toronto)
• M.A. (Queen's University)
• PhD (University of Toronto)

Visiting Fellowships

• 2019: Department of English, University of Toronto
• 2015: Department of English, University of Toronto
• 2014-2015: Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London

Professional memberships

British Shakespeare Association (BSA)

British Association for Modernist Studies (BAMS)

Modern Language Association of America (MLA)

Modernist Studies Association (MSA)

North American Conference for British Studies (NACBS)

Shakespeare Association of America (SAA)

• Date
• Type
• Selected

I have designed and taught the following modules at Cardiff University:

• Critical Reading and Critical Writing (team-taught module)
• Drama: Page and Stage
• Shakespeare’s Comedies
• John Donne
• The Victorian Novel (with Dr. Becky Munford)
• Social Politics and National Style: American Fiction and Form, 1920-1940
• The American South in Literature and Film
• Literature and the London Blitz
• Modern Drama I
• Modern Drama II
• Modern Drama: Page, Stage, Screen
• The Film Musical
• Music and Nation
• Literature into Film
• Modern and Contemporary American Drama

I have supervised postgraduate dissertations on Renaissance drama, the Victorian novel, twentieth-century American fiction, 1920s experimental theatre, British interwar fiction, opera, and modern British theatre.

I welcome enquiries about supervision in any of the areas above or in the research areas listed on the 'Overview' and 'Research' pages.

My research is often interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary, and has ranged across literary periods and genres.

I am currently working on two book projects:Wagnerism and British Culture: Myth, Modernism, and the Art-Work of the Future and On the Frontier: The Stage Lives of W. H. Auden in Britain and America.

Individual articles have explored the figure of the isolated musician in the Victorian novel; Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, and nineteenth-century opera; and the intertextual presence of Shakespeare, Milton, and Tennyson in the novels of Dickens and Twain. Essays on modern and contemporary culture have analysed the Edwardian enthusiasms of David Mamet on film; intertextuality in Nella Larsen; the Anglophilia of Lerner and Lowe; the anti-theatricality of the contemporary English stage; and the relationship between artistic expression, social empowerment, and cultural nationalism in the reception of the London Olympics Opening ceremony. Others have explored the New Elizabethan status of Hilary Mantel, the signifying theatricality of Greek drama in the work of Tennessee Williams, and the dynamic, pervasive resonance of Shakespearean theatre in modern and contemporary politics, pageantry, and drama.

My books have focussed primarily on literature, the arts, and the social and political implications of cultural nationalism in modern and contemporary Britain, from a variety of perspectives and methodologies.

Research interests

Drama: modern and contemporary; medieval and Renaissance, particularly its afterlife in literature, theatre, film, and contemporary culture

Intermediality, adaptation, and intertextuality: Victorian intertexualities; modernist aesthetics (esp. Auden, Eliot, Woolf, Forster); music and literature; film and theatre; film and literature; popular music studies; the novel and the 'other arts'

Nationalism and national aesthetics, particularly in British literature, music, theatre, political discourse, and historiography

Trans-Atlanticism: Dickens and Twain, Southern Gothic and the Victorian novel, Britain and Canada (esp post-WWII)