McDonald appointed chair in modern Irish studies

Professor Rónán McDonald, a scholar of Samuel Beckett, literary critic and historian of Irish modernism, has been appointed as the Australian Ireland Fund chair in modern Irish studies at UNSW. McDonald is director of the new John Hume Institute in Global Irish Studies based in UNSW’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. The institute is the result of the first Australian partnership with University College Dublin. A native of Dublin, McDonald was most recently director of the Beckett International Foundation at the University of Reading in the UK. He is a reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement and The Guardian and author of Death of the Critic.