Staff Profile
Dr Niall Gildea
Lecturer, English
I joined York St John after periods teaching at the University of London (where I was awarded my PhD) and Lancaster University.
My academic research originally focused almost exclusively on the work of the French-Algerian philosopher Jacques Derrida, and specifically debates in the late twentieth century to do with the legitimacy or otherwise of his work as 'philosophy'.
My focus has more recently turned back towards my first discipline, English Literature, and specifically to what I consider to be a crisis of confidence or even of legitimacy in the subject's conception of itself, symptomatized by its current embrace of the 'creative-critical' and the 'post-critical'.
I have in recent years become very enthusiastic about the life and work of the twentieth-century British philosopher and writer Richard Wollheim, and would especially welcome discussions with anyone who has an interest in Wollheim’s work.
- School – School of Humanities
- Email – n.gildea@yorksj.ac.uk
Further information
Teaching
In Semester 1 of the academic year 2024-25, I directed the modules LIT5001M Literary Theory and LIT6007M The Experimental Century. I also taught on LIT4003M Writing, Research, and Literature. In Semester 2, I am directing the module LIT7005M Speculative Bodies, and teaching on LIT4004M Introduction to Literary Studies 2.
Research
My main research specialism is in the history of modern and contemporary theories of literature. Relatedly, I am interested in what might vaguely be called concept genesis: ideas around how epistemic frameworks arise and are maintained, from both sociocultural-institutional and libidinal-affective points of view.
My first book, Jacques Derrida’s Cambridge Affair: Deconstruction, Philosophy and Institutionality (2020), was an intellectual history of Derrida’s contested Honorary Doctorate at Cambridge in 1992. I have also published work on an eclectic range of writers which includes Mark Fisher, Melanie Klein, J. Hillis Miller, Jean-François Lyotard, Adam Phillips and Roger Scruton. I am currently writing a book called An Introduction to Literary Post-Criticism, about different kinds of ‘post-critical’ initiative in contemporary literary scholarship. I am also editor of a forthcoming interdisciplinary collection of essays on Raymond Williams’s concept of ‘structures of feeling’ for University of Wales Press.
Publications and conferences
Books (author)
- An Introduction to Literary Post-Criticism (Routledge, forthcoming). Monograph. Author.
- Jacques Derrida’s Cambridge Affair: Deconstruction, Philosophy and Institutionality (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020). Monograph. Author.
Books (editor)
- Raymond Williams and Structures of Feeling (University of Wales Press, forthcoming). Edited collection. Editor.
- English Studies: The State of the Discipline, Past, Present, and Future (Palgrave, 2015). Edited collection. Co-editor.
Journal articles
- ‘The Family Photo at the Overlook Hotel: Fisher, King, Freud, Klein, and the Image of Psychoanalysis’, article in Textual Practice (Routledge) Vol 37, No. 5 (2023), 832-46. Author.
- ‘Parenthesis: Arthur Bradley, Unbearable Life’, short article in The Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory (Whitestone Publications), Vol. 21, No. 3 (Fall 2022), 418-21. Author.
- ‘“Fanciful Associations”: The Perverse Endurance of Derrida’s (sic) “Logical Phallusies”’, article in Critical Survey (Berghahn Journals), Vol. 34, No. 1 (Spring 2022), 87-101. Author.
- ‘Conversions of “Bartleby”: Deconstruction, Literature, Psychoanalysis’, article in Textual Practice (Routledge), Vol. 35, No. 12 (2021), 2129-45. Author.
- ‘Also Intransitive. Mark Fisher’s Hauntology’, article in CounterText (Edinburgh University Press), Vol. 6, No. 3 (December 2020), 401-22. Author.
- ‘Structures of Feeling. A Curated Research Conversation’, short article in the ISRF Bulletin, Issue XXII, ed. Lars Cornelissen (October 2020) (Independent Social Research Foundation), 35-45. Editor.
- ‘The “And” of Modernism: On New Periodizations’, article in Modernist Cultures, Vol. 14, No. 4 (November 2019) (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), 446-68. Co-author.
- ‘Aliens in Cambridge’, article in ‘Imagining Derrida’, special issue of Derrida Today, Vol. 10, No. 2 (November 2017), eds. Sarah Dillon and John Schad (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 212-32. Author
Book chapters
- ‘Raymond Williams’s (Re)sources’, book chapter in Raymond Williams and Structures of Feeling, eds. Louise Braddock and Niall Gildea (University of Wales Press, forthcoming).
- ‘Roger Scruton’s Daughters: Feminism and Parasitism in the Idea of a University’, book chapter in Influence and Inheritance in Feminist English Studies, eds. Emily Hogg and Clara Jones (Palgrave, 2015), 80-94. Author.
- ‘Introduction: The State of the Discipline’, book chapter in English Studies: The State of the Discipline, Past, Present, and Future (Palgrave, 2015), 1-14. Co-author.
Reviews
- ‘Christopher Norris, A Partial Truth. Poems 2015-19’, book review in SubStance, Vol. 52, No. 2 (2023), 122-26. Author.
- ‘William S. Allen, Illegibility: Blanchot and Hegel’, book review in Hegel Bulletin, Vol. 44, No. 2 (2023), 379-83. Author.
- ‘Peter Salmon, An Event, Perhaps: A Biography of Jacques Derrida’, book review in Inscriptions, Vol. 2, No. 4 (2021), 217-19. Author.
- ‘New Directions in Supernatural Horror Literature: The Critical Influence of H. P. Lovecraft, ed. Sean Moreland’, book review in Pulse: The Journal of Science and Culture, Vol. 7 (2020), 1-5. Author.
- ‘Arthur Bradley, Unbearable Life: A Genealogy of Political Erasure’, book review in Textual Practice (2020). Author.
- ‘Scarlett Baron, The Birth of Intertextuality: The Riddle of Creativity’, book review in Review of English Studies (2020). Author.
- ‘David Wills, Inanimation: Theories of Inorganic Life’, book review in New Formations 91 (2017), 116-17. Author.
- ‘Cognition, Literature and History, eds. Mark J. Bruhn and Donald R. Wehrs’, book review in The British Association for Romantic Studies Review (Spring 2017), 35-37. Author.
- ‘Or Words to That Effect. Orality and the Writing of Literary History, eds. Daniel F. Chamberlain and J. Edward Chamberlain’, book review in Recherche littéraire/Literary Research, Vol. 33 (2017), 133-38. Author.
- ‘Marc Redfield, Theory at Yale: The Strange Case of Deconstruction in America’, book review in Review31 (2016). Author.
- ‘Mark Currie, The Invention of Deconstruction’, book review in Review31 (2014). Author.
- ‘Jacques Derrida, The Death Penalty, Volume I’, book review in Review31 (2014). Author.
- ‘John Schad, The Late Walter Benjamin’, book review in The Glass, No. 26 (Spring 2014). Author.
Selected conference presentations
- ‘Introducing Richard Wollheim’, at The Richard Wollheim Centenary Project (University of Oxford, February 2024).
- ‘Richard Wollheim as a Theorist of Literature’, at The Richard Wollheim Centenary Project (University of Oxford, January 2024).
- ‘Elizabeth Bruss’s Last Word’, at The Errant Symposium (Lancaster University, April 2023).
- ‘Debating Sentimental Onto(theo)logy’, at contemporary@Lancaster: New Directions in Literature, Criticism, and Theory (Lancaster University, December 2022).
- ‘Raymond Williams’s (Re)sources’, at contemporary@Lancaster: New Directions in Literature, Criticism, and Theory (Lancaster University, June 2022).
- ‘Parenthesis’, at Author meets Critics book roundtable: Arthur Bradley, Unbearable Life (University of Vienna, November 2021).
- ‘Richard Wollheim’s Shapes’, at Topics in Interdisciplinary Psychoanalytic Thought – Papers on Trauma and Transmission conference (University of Oxford, October 2021).
- ‘The Family Photo at the Overlook Hotel: Mark Fisher and the image of psychoanalysis’, at The Political Imaginarium (Lancaster University, March 2021).
- ‘Structure contra Structuralism in Raymond Williams’, at The St John’s Psychoanalysis Seminar (University of Oxford, November 2020).
- ‘Jacques Derrida: The Cambridge Affair’, with Benoît Peeters (Lancaster University, October 2020).
- ‘Darwin and Derrida, and Derrida’, at Cognitive Futures: Forging Futures from the Past: History and Cognition (University of Oxford, April 2015).
- ‘Aliens in Cambridge (in Cambridge)’, at Imagining Derrida: a critical and creative symposium (University of Cambridge, February 2015).
- ‘Love in the University’, at Screening of Love in the Post: From Plato to Derrida (University College Dublin, November 2014).
- ‘Bellerophonies’, at Symposium on the Odyssey (Queen Mary, University of London, September 2014).
- ‘Heidegger in the Grip’, at Textual Embodiment: Literature, the Body and Psychoanalysis (Goldsmiths, University of London, August 2014).
- ‘The and of Modernism’, at Modernism Now! (Institute of English Studies, June 2014).
- ‘Reprising the “Cambridge Affair”’, at Derrida Today (Fordham University, May 2014).
Professional activities
I am co-organizer of the research network, Interdisciplinary Psychoanalytic Thought, in connexion with which I co-convene the Interdisciplinary Seminars in Psychoanalysis, based at St John's College, Oxford.
In 2023-24 I helped run the Richard Wollheim Centenary Project, which was generously supported by the Independent Social Research Foundation and the Royal Institute of Philosophy. I continue to be involved in the second phase of this project.
