Denis Flannery

I have teaching and research interests across American, Irish and English popular culture, including music, literature, theatre, cinema and theory with a particular emphasis on the interrelations between culture, writing and affect.

Henry James has been foundational for my work in many different ways. James featured prominently in my book On Sibling Love and I have published on the figure of apostrophe and its relationship to mourning in recent James-fixated fiction by writers like Alan Hollinghurst as well as on the relationship between devotion and queer subjectivity in James's short stories.

Cinema and visual culture have played an important part in my other work which has looked, for example, at Fincher's 1995 film Seven in terms of queer theory and more recently at the role of the pair in Robert Mapplethorpe's photography. But my more recent work has focused on Theatre, Irish Studies and creative writing. My work on theatre concentrates on the Dutch Theatre company Toneelgroep, Amsterdam (TGA). I have recently completed a major article about TGA's production of Tony Kushner's Angels in America paying attention to the "presence" of David Bowie's music and persona in their reading of those plays.