Professor Barry Sloan is an Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Southampton.
I hold degrees from Trinity College Dublin (1971 and 1973), the University of Southampton (1977) and University College Cork (1983). Before joining the University of Southampton, I had extensive teaching experience in further and higher education.
I have interests in nineteenth- and twentieth-century century Irish writing, with a particular focus on the interactions between literature, history and religion; modern Irish life writing; literature and religion in nineteenth-century English writing; and nineteenth-century writing on the impact of change on rural life and work.
I am a member of the Southampton Centre for Nineteenth-Century Research, and a member of the executive committee of the Richard Jefferies Society.
I am preparing material for a book which draws on the periodical press, and the work of agricultural writers such as Alexander Somerville, James Caird and H. Rider Haggard, and of cultural commentators such as William Howitt, Richard Jefferies and George Sturt, to examine the history of the social/cultural representations of the agricultural labourer in England from the 1830s to 1914.