David Coughlan

Dr David Coughlan studied for his BA in English and Philosophy at University College Cork. He completed his MPhil in English Literature at UCC also before gaining his PhD from Goldsmiths College, University of London. He was a Lecturer in English at Chuo University, Tokyo, a Teaching Assistant at the University of Limerick, and an IRC Government of Ireland Post-Doctoral Fellow at UCC before joining the School of English, Irish, and Communication at UL as a Lecturer in English in 2008.

He was Associate Head of School (Quality in Teaching, Learning and Research) from 2009 to 2011, Head of English from 2016 to 2019, and Chair of the School's Postgraduate and Research committee from 2019 to 2024. He is currently a member of Athena Swan/EDI Committees at Faculty and University level. He was Chair of the Irish Association for American Studies from 2017 to 2019 and was Editor-in-Chief of the association's official journal, Irish Journal of American Studies IJAS Online, from 2015 to 2021.

He has published on American literature, contemporary fiction, and graphic novels in the journals Cultural Critique, ImageTexT, College Literature, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, and Modern Fiction Studies and in a number of encyclopedias and edited collections, including More Critical Approaches to Comics from Routledge. He has been a contributing co-editor on two special journal issues: Where Ghosts Live for Derrida Today in 2012 and Survival of the Death Sentence for Parallax in 2016. He is the author of Ghost Writing in Contemporary American Fiction, published with Palgrave Macmillan in 2016.

Dr Coughlan's research interests are in American literature and in late twentieth-century and contemporary fiction, in comic books and graphic novels, and in literature and philosophy, especially the work of Jacques Derrida. He has published on authors including Paul Auster, John Banville, Don DeLillo, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ben Lerner, Jonathan Lethem, Grant Morrison, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, Marilynne Robinson, Philip Roth, and David Foster Wallace and on topics including adaptation, death sentences, democracy, ghost writing, hospitality, intertextuality, masculinity, postmodernism, reading, and spatiality. His current project is Read, Learn, Live: Contemporary Fiction’s Guide to Survival.

Dr Coughlan teaches English literature at undergraduate and postgraduate level in the School of English, Irish, and Communication. He is on sabbatical leave in AY2024/25, but his usual teaching includes EH4141 English Literature 1: Novels and Short Fiction, EH4023 The New World: American Literature to 1890, EH4016 State of the Union: American Literature since 1890, and EH6012 Politics and American Literature.

Dr Coughlan is accepting PhD students. His supervision includes 3 completed and 5 current PhDs on topics such as 9/11 literature, genre cinema, affect in fiction, Kurt Vonnegut, Asian-American literature, Jewish-American literature, and the psychology of characters. He has also mentored IRC Postdoctoral Fellow Dr Andrew Cunning on the project Marilynne Robinson, Theologian of the Ordinary (2019-20). Dr Coughlan welcomes proposals related to his research interests.