Research Interests
Open to PhD applications in the field of
- Contemporary Poetry
- Modern Irish and British poetry
- Poetics
Gail supervises students undertaking both critical and creative projects in poetry.
Public outreach & key achievements
- Dr McConnell was Principal Investigator for 'Listening to Voices:
funded by the AHRC under the Connected Communities Programme. - She won the Ink, Sweat and Tears Poetry Pamphlet Competition 2017 and her work has been funded by the Arts Council Northern Ireland
- Beyond the academy, she has given and hosted talks at Seamus Heaney HomePlace, Mountains to Sea/Poetry Now, Happy Days International Beckett Festival, Dublin Writers Festival, Aspects Festival, and on the TV series and app.
- She co-edits The Irish Review.
- She has read poetry at Just For One Day – marking the twentieth anniversary of the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement; Belfast Pride, Carafest; and at the Universities of York and Reading.
Research students
| PhD Title | 'The Tree is Missing' & ’Literature and politics strolled hand in hand': Censorship, Surveillance, and Poetry in Northern Ireland and Romania in the 1980s' (With Dr. Stephen Sexton) |
| Name | Shannon Kelly |
| Years of Study | AHRC-funded. Completed September 2024. |
| PhD Title | Isdal (Creative Component) & '"I was ashamed, but undaunted (my epithet?)": intersections of shame and elegy in Maggie Nelson's Jane: A Murder' (With Dr Stephen Sexton) |
| Name | Susannah Dickey |
| Years of Study | AHRC-funded. Completed June 2023. |
| PhD Title | 'Yeats and Labour' |
| Name | Patrick Macfarlane |
| Years of Study | AHRC-funded. Completed August 2020. |
Alumni: Where are they now
| PhD Title | ''We Play Here'; 'Strangely Alive': Elizabeth Bishop and the 'Art of Story Writing' (Supervised with Dr Leontia Flynn) |
| Name | Dawn Watson |
| Years of Study | Completed November 2022 |
| Current Position | Lecturer in Creative Writing at Â鶹ÒùÔº. |
| PhD Title | 'If All the World and Love Were Young; “A Body That is Made into A Sign”: Elegy, Translation and Ekphrasis in Anne Carson’s Nox' (Supervised with Professor Sinéad Morrissey) |
| Name | Stephen Sexton |
| Years of Study | Completed May 2017 |
| Current Position | Lecturer in Creative Writing at Â鶹ÒùÔº |
| PhD Title | 'The Breadbasket of Europe: new poems and moving images; Perpetual Speech: Hollis Frampton's Gloria! as Lyric Poem’ (Supervised with Professor Ciaran Carson and Dr Colin Graham) |
| Name | Alice Lyons |
| Years of Study | Completed May 2014 |
| Current Position | Lecturer in Writing and Literature at ATU Sligo |
Discover More
- Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences
- School of Arts, English and Languages
- Seamus Heaney Centre
- Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice