Dr Tony Murray is the Director of the Irish Writers in London Summer School and Curator of the Archive of the Irish in Britain. He's also a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing in the School of Art, Architecture and Design.
Tony Murray
Dr Tony Murray is Director of the Irish Writers in London Summer School and Curator of the Archive of the Irish in Britain.
Tony graduated in Irish Studies in 1992 and, after running an Irish community bookshop and literary festival for a number of years, joined the Irish Studies Centre at London Metropolitan University in 1995, eventually becoming its Director from 2012-17.
Tony has taught Irish Studies and English Literature for over twenty years, and has run the annual Irish Writers in London Summer School since its inception in 1996. He is Curator of the Archive of the Irish in Britain, a unique collection of documents, audio and video recordings, books, photographs and ephemera cataloguing the history of the Irish in Britain from the late nineteenth century to the present day. He is currently curating the digitization of the Archive, which is supported with a grant from the Irish Government’s Emigrant Support Programme.
- BA (Hons) Irish Studies with History (University of North London, 1992)
- MA Cultural Studies: History and Theory (University of East London, 1995)
- PhD (Staffordshire University, 2009)
Tony's research is in literary and cultural representations of the Irish diaspora with a particular focus on the Irish in Britain. He is especially interested in the role of narrative in the construction and mediation of migrant identities. He sits on the committee of the Irish Literary Society, is a member of the International Association for the Study of Irish Literature, the British Association for Irish Studies and regularly appears in British and Irish media.
Books
London Irish Fictions: Narrative, Diaspora and Identity (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012)
Articles
Joyce, Dubliners and Diaspora in Irish Studies Review special issue 26:1 (February 2018)
Introduction: Irishness and the culture of the Irish abroad with Ellen McWilliams in Irish Studies Review special issue 26:1 (February 2018)
From the Heroic to the Elegiac: Portrayals of the Post-War Irish Navvy in London in The Stinging Fly 31 (Summer 2015)
Winifred M. Patton and the Irish Revival in London in Irish Studies Review 22:1 (February 2014)
Edna O’Brien and Narrative Diaspora Space in Irish Studies Review 21:1 (February 2013)
Anthony Cronin: “The Life of Riley” 1964 in London Fictions, (December 2012)
A Diasporic Vernacular?: The Narrativization of Identity in Second Generation Irish Memoir in Irish Review 44, Winter 2011
Irish women writers still in the wings in Irish Post (20 November 2010)
Curious Streets: Diaspora, Displacement and Transgression in Desmond Hogan’s London Irish Narratives in Irish Studies Review, 14:2, 2006: 239-53
Holding Up a Mirror to the Irish in Britain in British Association of Irish Studies Newsletter (June 2001)
The Changing Face of the Irish in London in Irish Post (17 March 2001)
When did you come over? The Story of Irish Migration to Britain with Mary J Hickman (June, 2000)
Book chapters
Rafferty’s Return: Diaspora and Dislocation in Edna O’Brien’s “Shovel Kings” in Michael Pierse (ed.) Rethinking the Irish Diaspora: After the Gathering (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan: Palgrave, 2018)
Writing Irish Nurses in Britain in Michael Pierse (ed.) A History of Irish Working-Class Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018)
Suspect Stories: William Trevor’s fictional portrayals of the Irish in London in the 1970s in Graham Dawson, Jo Dover and Stephen Hopkins (eds.) The Northern Ireland Troubles in Britain: Impacts, Engagements, Legacies and Memories (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017)
Troubled Tales: Fictional Portrayals of the Irish in London in the 1970s in Tom Herron (ed.) Irish Writing London – Volume 2: Post-War to the Present (London: Continuum, 2013)
A Beckett Walk in Chelsea in O’Shea, Brian and Sean Donlon, The Paris of Joyce and Beckett: A Tourist Guide, (London: London Irish Literary Travel, 2007)
Navvy Narratives: Interactions between Fictional an Autobiographical Accounts of Irish Construction Workers in Britain in Liam Harte, Yvonne Whelan and Patrick Crotty (eds.)
Ireland: Space, Text, Time (Dublin: Liffey Press, 2005)
Films
On the Map: 30 Years of the Irish Studies Centre (2016) director and producer
I Only Came Over for a Couple of Years... Interviews with London Irish Elders (2005) co-producer with David Kelly
Email: t.murray@londonmet.ac.uk