Dr Michael Faherty

Profile

Dr Michael Faherty, Principal Lecturer in English Studies, Course Leader for English Studies and for Education Studies and English

I studied for my first degree at my local university, the University of Wisconsin, Platteville. After working as a journalist in the Rocky Mountains and then as an English teacher for the Peace Corps in Togo, West Africa, I continued my studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

While writing my PhD dissertation on German abstract expressionism and modern American poetry, I was offered a Heinrich Hertz fellowship at the University of Cologne and, following that, a lectureship there in English literature. In 1992, I moved to England to become a lecturer in English Studies at De Montfort University in Bedford.

The Bedford campus of De Montfort University merged with the University of Luton in August 2006 to form the University of Bedfordshire, where I am now Principal Lecturer in English Studies and Course Leader for English Studies and for Education Studies and English.

Teaching role

I am responsible for two compulsory courses in English Studies at Bedford. They are our first-year core module Literature in History and our second-year core module in medieval and renaissance literature.

I also teach optional courses in world literatures in English. This includes a second-year option in American literature and third-year options in African literature and Irish literature.

Research interests

Most of my published research has been in the area of modern and contemporary poetry. This has included essays on the work of Paul Blackburn, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, Allen Curnow, Stephen Dobyns, John Montague, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Matthew Sweeney and William Butler Yeats.

I have also edited annotated editions of the novels of Stephen Crane and Leo Tolstoy, including a four-volume edition of the Constance Garnett translation of War and Peace. I have presented papers at conferences in America, England, France, Italy and the Principality of Monaco.

Recent research outputs

"Moderate Modernism: Lincoln Kirstein and the Hound & Horn." Forthcoming in the second volume of The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, edited by Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker for Oxford University Press.
"The Strange Ones: John Montague, Ezra Pound and the Troubadour Tradition" in Poetry Criticism, Volume 106, edited by Michelle Lee (Detroit: Gale, 2010): 299-306.
“Pound’s Lute: The West African Voice of the Gesere in the Pisan Cantos” in Ezra Pound, Language and Persona, edited by Massimo Bacigalupo and William Pratt (Genoa: University of Genoa Press, 2008): 221-33.
“Paul Blackburn and the Troubadours of the Lower East Side,” North Dakota Quarterly 75.1 (2008): 110-23.
Review of The Collected Stories of Lorrie Moore. Warwick Review 2.3 (2008): 94-97.