Justin Quinn

Associate Professor of American and English Literature

E: justin.quinn [at] ff.cuni.cz
ORCID: 0000-0002-0973-5965
 
Justin Quinn was born in Dublin, and educated there at Trinity College (BA & PhD). With David Wheatley, he was a founding editor of the Irish poetry magazine, Metre. His translations of the Czech poet Petr Borkovec, From the Interior, appeared in 2008 from Seren. He also lectures at the Department of English, Faculty of Education, University of West Bohemia. In 2017 his translations of Bohuslav Reynek, The Well at Morning: Selected Poems, 1925-1971, were published by the Charles University Press, with essays by Martin C. Putna and Jiří Šerých (read a sample). He is presently translating the poetry of Jan Zábrana, which will be published with a selection of his diaries, translated by Jonathan Bolton.

With Gabriela Klečková, he is editing a book for Routledge entitled Anglophone Literature in Second-Language Teacher Education: Curriculum Innovation through Intercultural Communication. It is based on the new program at the English Dept of the Faculty of Education at the University of West Bohemia and will be published in 2021.

He has published six collections of poetry, and his work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, Yale Review, TLS, Berfrois, Poetry Review, Manchester Review, Irish Times, New Yorker, Poetry Ireland Review, Souvislosti, The Literateur, Body and the Irish Review among others. Tomáš Fürstenzeller translated his poetry into Czech (Vlny a stromy; Opus, 2009). A novel, Mount Merrion (Penguin), was published in 2013; it was translated by his wife, Tereza Límanová, into Czech and published by Argo in 2015. He has written essays occasionally for the Dublin Review. (Landscape and Memory in the Sudetens, The Cabinet: A House in Prague) He gave a talk at TEDx Plzeň about translating - and being translated by - poetry.

He contributed translations to the forthcoming End of the World: Poetry and Prose, by Ivan M. Jirous (Charles University Press/U of Chicago Press).

A new book of poems, Shallow Seas, is published by Gallery Press in Fall 2020. In this video, he reads, Child of Prague, a poem from the book.

He wrote an essay, A Blaze to the Bear, about a walk from Černošice to Beroun, in honor of David Wheatley`s fifieth birthday; it was published online in August 2020.

Academic Books
Between Two Fires: Transnationalism and Cold War Poetry (Oxford UP, 2015); Czech translation (2018), translated by Martin Pokorný (Charles University Press , 2018)

Cambridge Introduction to Modern Irish Poetry, 1800-2000 (Cambridge UP, 2008)

American Errancy: Empire, Sublimity and Modern Poetry (UCD Press, 2005)
read the chapter on Thom Gunn; read the chapter on Allen Ginsberg

Gathered Beneath the Storm: Wallace Stevens, Nature and Community (UCD Press, 2002)

As editor:
Irish Poetry After Feminism (2008)

Lectures on American Literature, 3rd edition (2011)
 
Recent Reviews
Rev. of Derek Mahon, Washing Up. TLS (forthcoming)
Rev. of Jacob Edmond, Make it the Same: Poetry in the Age of Global Media. In TLS Dec. 4, 2020.
Rev. of Benjamin Keatinge, ed., Making Integral: Critical essays on Richard Murphy. In Postcolonial Text 15.1 (2020)

Selected Recent and Forthcoming Articles
Zamiast konkluzji. Konteksty kultury 17.1 (2020): 129-132. [In Polish], trans. Marek Król.

Yeats, Pound and World English. The Oxford Handbook of W. B. Yeats, eds. Lauren Arrington and Matthew Campbell (forthcoming)

Paul Muldoon a hyperobjekty. Trans. Martin Světlík. In: Věci v básních: od Achilleova štítu po hyperobjekty (Vydavatelství Univerzita Karlova, Filozofická fakulta, 2020), 385-405.

Irish as a Lingua Franca, Litteraria Pragensia 30.59 (July 2020): 108-120. (You can see the whole issue here.)

Yeats and the End of the World. International Yeats Studies 4.1 (2020). PDF available thru link.

Paul Muldoon and the Irish Language. Litteraria Pragensia 28.55 (Jul 2018): 30-42. (PDF) [For those interested in the whole issue about the global contexts of literature in Gaelic and Gallic, see this link.]

Eavan Boland. In: Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets, ed. Gerald Dawe. Cambridge UP, 2017.

Stevens and Landscape. In: Stevens in Context, ed. Glen MacLeod. Cambridge UP, 2017. 77-86.

Seamus Heaney`s Critical Audiences. In: Seamus Heaney in Context, ed. Geraldine Higgins (Cambridge UP, forthcoming).

Postcolonial Poetry of Ireland. In: The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Poetry. Ed. Jahan Ramazani. Cambridge UP, 2017. 98-109.

"Out in the Open: The Pocket Book of Edward Thomas." In: Dusk and Dawn: Literature Between Two Centuries, eds Šárka Grauová and Eva Voldřichová Beránková. Faculty of Arts Charles University Press, 2017.333-355. pdf

"Na čerstvém vzduchu: Kapesní knížka Edwarda Thomase." In: Pokusy o renesanci západu: Literární a duchovní východiska na přelomu 19. a 20. století. Eds. Anna Housková a Vladimír Svatoň. Praha: Opera Facultatis philosophicae Universitatus Carolinae Pragensis, vol. 17, 2016. 353-372.

Stevens Across the Iron Curtain. In: Poetry and Poetics After Wallace Stevens. Ed. Bart Eeckhout and Lisa Goldfarb. Bloomsbury, 2016. 89-102.

Regionalism, Globalism and Seamus Heaney`s Latin Lift-Off. Journal of European Studies 46.1 (2016): 1-14. Special Heaney Issue, eds Jacek Gutorow and David Kennedy.

Poetry Books
The Ooaa Bird (Carcanet, 1995)
Privacy (Carcanet, 1999)
Fuselage (Gallery, 2002)
Waves & Trees (Gallery, 2006)
Close Quarters (Gallery, 2011)
Early House (Gallery, 2015)
Shallow Seas (Gallery, 2020)

Thesis proposals welcome in the following areas:
BA, MA, PhD: 20th-century Anglophone poetry; contemporary anglophone fiction from beyond Inner Circle countries; transnationalism; cosmopolitanism; translation; intercultural theory (in connection with applied linguistics)

Essay Submission
Please submit essays in electronic format only via email. No essays will be marked between 1 July and 15 August. Also, during the summer I will not be able to answer promptly emails regarding other matters (essay proposals, etc.) - expect delays of 1-2 wks.

For Thesis Writers
Thesis writers at all levels should consult a style manual. I recommend either The Elements of Style, by William Strunk Jr and E. B. White, or The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person`s Guide to Writing in the Twentieth-First Century, by Steven Pinker. While the first is sometimes too prescriptive and idiosyncratic, it is brief. The second is longer, but more thorough, more exact and more up-to-date. They are both entertaining reads.

If I am supervising your BA or MA Thesis and you wish to have it examined in autumn, you must submit the complete text to me no later than June 15.  Also, you must submit a first chapter, with full scholarly apparatus, by 15 March, in order to  ensure that formatting and style are correct. I expect that you will provide chapters individually from March to June. The timetable for defence of theses in the winter exam period should follow roughly the same schedule.

Communicating with the instructor
You can address me either as "Dr. Quinn" or "Justin," whichever you are more comfortable with; if we are speaking Czech, we should use Vy, unless otherwise agreed. By default, I will address you by your first name, but if you are uncomfortable with this please let me know. Communication by email should be formal and professional, closer to a letter than social-media posting/messaging. My pronouns are: he/his/him.

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Regular Reads
Beo Ar Éigean
HIS voice
Deník N
Respekt
Guardian
New Yorker
New York Review of Books