Susan Cannon Harris
Director of Graduate Studies
Professor, English
Fellow of the Keough Naughton Institute for Irish Studies; Concurrent Professor of Film, Television and Theater; Gender Studies Faculty
Areas of study
- British - 20th and 21st
- Gender and Sexuality
- Irish
- Postcolonial/Global
Education
Ph.D University of Texas at Austin, 1998
M.A. Univeristy of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1993
B.A. Yale University, 1991
Research and teaching interests
20th & 21st Century Irish Literature, 20th & 21st Century Drama in English, Performance Studies, Gender Studies, LGBTQ+ fiction, theater and theory
Biography
Susan Cannon Harris is a Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, where she is a fellow of the Keough Naughton Institute for Irish studies; she is also part of the Gender Studies faculty and is concurrent in Film, Television, and Theater. Her main research interest is twentieth and twenty-first century Irish drama, approached from a comparative perspective which incorporates their international context. She has published on W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge, Sean O'Casey, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Samuel Beckett, Conor McPherson, Lorraine Hansberry, and Bertolt Brecht. Her most recent book, Irish Drama and the Other Revolutions, investigated the ways in which modern Irish playwrights mediated between the socialist and feminist/queer revolutions that defined the history modern drama in Europe and North America. Like her research, her teaching is informed by a longstanding interest in theories of embodiment--an area of inquiry which embraces phenomenology, acting theory, performance theory, feminist theory, queer theory, postcolonial theory, and decolonial theory. She has also published a series of articles about theater in eighteenth century Dublin and is currently at work on a project about American theater in the digital age.
Harris is currently the Director of Graduate Studies for the Department of English.
Representative publications
- Irish Drama and the Other Revolutions: Playwrights, Sexual Politics and the International Left, 1892-1964. Edinburgh U. P., 2017.
- Gender and Modern Irish Drama. Indiana University Press, 2002.
- “Yeats’s Early Plays: Gender, Genre, and Queer Collaboration.” Forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook of W. B. Yeats, ed. Lauren Arrington and Matthew Campbell.
- “Supernaturalism: Femininity and Form in Conor McPherson’s Paranormal Plays.” Breac: A Digital Journal of Irish Studies. July 10, 2014.
- “Synge and Gender.” The Cambridge Companion to J. M. Synge. P. J. Mathews, ed. Cambridge University Press, 2009. 104-116.
