My research interests include drama, theatre and performance, Irish writing, genetic criticism and cultural representations of coercive confinement.

 

I have written two books on Samuel Beckett. My first, Samuel Beckett in Confinement: The Politics of Closed Space (2020), re-situates the politics of Beckett's work within the boxes, bins, urns and mounds in which we so often encounter his characters. I followed this with The Making of Samuel Beckett’s Not I / Pas moi, That Time / Cette fois and Footfalls / Pas (2021), a genetic study of three iconic late plays which contends that they stage the breakdown between subject and object. To accompany this monograph, I co-edited a digital genetic edition as part of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project. I am currently working on a book which maps Irish literary and cultural representations of coercive confinement.

 

I have supervised postgraduate students working on gender studies, modernism, theatre studies and Irish writing. I welcome contact from those looking to work on any topic related to my fields of interest.

• The Making of Samuel Beckett’s Not I / Pas moi, That Time / Cette fois and  Footfalls / Pas (University Press Antwerp and Bloomsbury, 2021).
• Samuel Beckett in Confinement: The Politics of Closed Space (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020).

Digital editions

• Not I / Pas moi, That Time / Cette fois and Footfalls / Pas: a digital genetic edition, ed. James Little and Vincent Neyt (University Press Antwerp, 2022).

Edited collections

• Ireland: Interfaces and Dialogues, ed. Ondřej Pilný, Radvan Markus, Daniela Theinová and James Little, Irish Studies in Europe series no. 11, Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier (2022).
• ‘Draff / Résidu’, special issue of Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, 31.1 (2019), ed. James Little, Georgina Nugent-Folan, Emilie Morin and Mark Nixon.

Articles

• '“All that I Am Craving Is the Talk”: Collaboration, Translation and Lady Gregory’s Workhouse Ward', English Studies, 104.6 (2023), 1019–36.
• ‘Coercive Confinement and Irish Languages: Ó Cadhain, Behan, Heaney, Okorie’, Review of Irish Studies in Europe, 5.2 (2022) (with Radvan Markus).
• ‘Confinement and the Transnational in Emma Donoghue’s Room’, Open Library of Humanities, 8.2 (2022).
• ‘“Comparative Liberty”: John Mitchel’s Jail Journal and Austin Reed’s The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict’, Irish University Review, 52.1 (2022), 121–32.
• ‘Samuel Beckett’s Remembrance of Texts Past: Shakespeare, Proust and Joyce in Not I and That Time’, Litteraria Pragensia, 31.62 (2021), 78–104.
• ‘Staging Beckettian Minds: Umwelt and Cartesian Stage Space in Beckett’s Plays’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 31.4 (2021), 438–54 (with Olga Beloborodova).
• ‘Decomposing the Asylum in Samuel Beckett’s Malone Dies: Genetic Criticism and the Author’, Acta Universitatis Lodziensis. Folia Litteraria Polonica, 1.60 (2021), 65–77.
• ‘“Not There”: “Dark Matter” in Samuel Beckett’s Footfalls’, International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, 17.3 (2021), 373–86.
• ‘Reframing the Politics of Performance at 14 Henrietta Street: ANU’s Living the Lockout and Company SJ’s Fizzles’, Text and Performance Quarterly, 40.4 (2020), 343–63.
• ‘Quare Memory in Brendan Behan’s Borstal Boy’, Irish University Review, 50.2 (2020), 289–303.
• ‘Inhuman Habitations: Samuel Beckett’s Imagination Dead Imagine and All Strange Away’, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, 32.2 (2020), 239–54.
• ‘Introduction’ to ‘Draff / Résidu’, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, 31.1 (2019) (with Georgina Nugent-Folan), 1–6.
• ‘Beckett’s “Mongrel Mime”: Politics and Poetics’, Journal of Beckett Studies, 27.2 (2018), 193–210.
• ‘Home, the Asylum, and the Workhouse in The Shadow of the Glen’, Irish University Review,46.2 (2016), 260–74.
• ‘Between a Protest and Catastrophe’, Litteraria Pragensia, 25.50 (2015), 92–106.

Book chapters

• 'Introduction', in Ireland: Interfaces and Dialogues, ed. Ondřej Pilný, Radvan Markus, Daniela Theinová and James Little, Irish Studies in Europe series no. 11, (Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2022).
• ‘Waiting for Godot’, in Fifty Key Irish Plays, ed. Shaun Richards (Routledge, 2022), 78–81.
• ‘“First the Place, Then I’ll Find Me in It”: The Unnamable’s Pronouns and the Politics of Confinement’, in Beckett and Politics, ed. William Davies and Helen Bailey (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 69–85.

Reviews

• Review of Samuel Beckett as World Literature, The Beckett Circle, 44.2 (2023), https://thebeckettcircle.org/archive/.
• Review of The Making of volumes for L’Innommable / The Unnamable, Molloy, Malone meurt / Malone Dies, En attendant Godot / Waiting for Godot, Fin de partie / Endgame, Journal of Beckett Studies, 29.1 (2020), 125–35.
• Review of Samuel Beckett and the Politics of Aftermath and Samuel Beckett and the Language of Subjectivity, Irish University Review, 50.1 (2020), 240–3.
• Review of Navigating Ireland’s Theatre Archive, Australasian Journal of Irish Studies, 20 (2020).
• ‘Review of the Inaugural Conference of the Samuel Beckett Society, Phoenix, AZ, 19–20 February 2015’, in The Beckett Circle, 38.1 (2016), https://thebeckettcircle.org/archive/.
• ‘Reframing Scenography: Performing Space Symposium Report’, Blue Pages: Journal for the Society of British Theatre Designers, 4 (2014) (with Wei Feng), 24–6.