Ryan O'Shea

Profile

My PhD research, funded by LAHP, examines the representation of mortifications of the flesh in anglophone modernist literatures and their intersection with different spiritual traditions (Catholicism, Mysticism, Indigenous American religions, Hinduism). My work finds that these acts were of particular interest to both religious and irreligious modernist writers, intersecting with questions of belief, psychology, and selfhood characteristic of the period. Before Queen Mary, I studied a BA at Oxford and an MA at Durham. My broader research interests include modernism, sensory studies, religion and bodily experience, and forms of experimental writing.

Teaching

ESH295 London: Walking the City

Research

Publications

• O’Shea, Ryan, ‘“The Self which underlies […] separate individuality”: pain and the transcendence of selfhood in the work of Aldous Huxley’, Postgraduate English, 42 (2021)

I have also written on my work for research blogs:

• O’Shea, Ryan, 'Nose Perception in modernist literature: what's that between your eyes?', Lost Modernists (May 2023)
• O’Shea, Ryan, 'Brave New World is about more than the dangers of technology', Research in English at Durham (December 2021)