Christopher Cusack

Dr Chris Cusack (he/him) is a researcher, writer, teacher, and literary critic. He currently teaches at the University of Groningen. Previously, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, where he worked on a project on Irish- and German-American local colour writing. He has also been a lecturer and teacher educator at HAN University of Applied Sciences, as well as an instructor at the University of Amsterdam and Emerson College European Center. He was awarded his PhD cum laude in 2018 for a thesis on fiction about the Great Irish Famine, and has been the recipient of a number of scholar- and fellowships. His research on the literature and culture of Ireland and its North American diaspora has appeared or is forthcoming in a range of books, and in journals such as Atlantic Studies, Irish Studies Review, New Hibernia Review, Breac, Symbiosis, and Open Library of Humanities. He has also (co-)edited several books and a special issue of Religion & Literature. As a teacher, he enjoys writing about literature pedagogies.

In addition to his work on the Great Famine and local colour writing, Chris is co-editing a book on Irish literary corpses and beginning to write a cultural history of the coffin. By night, he moonlights as a poet, with big words but only fair to middling success. His creative work has appeared in various places, including Poetry Ireland Review, Banshee, The Honest Ulsterman, Hinterland, Ink Sweat & Tears, Abridged, 3:AM, and The Manchester Review. His literary criticism appears in venues such as the Times Literary Supplement, the Irish Times, Poetry London, and Poetry Review.

Chris likes books, cats, and T. rexes, and believes that Wikipedia is wrong in classifying the Godzilla franchise as dinosaur flicks.