Clare Hutton's research specialism is James Joyce, the Irish Literary Revival and twentieth century book history. 

She is interested in the roles that editors, agents, publishers, reviewers and readers can play in creating meaning. Her monograph, Serial Encounters: Ulysses and the Little Review (OUP, 2019), looked at the cultural and textual significance of the serial version of James Joyce's Ulysses. 

Originally published in the Little Review, an avant-garde journal, Joyce's Ulysses attracted controversy from the outset. It led to the prosecution of the journal's editors on grounds of the text's obscenity.

Whether it was the editors or the text which should have been charged remains open to question, and it was this kind of issue which underpinned Hutton's curatorship of Women and the Making of Ulysses, a major international exhibition at the Harry Ransom Center in Texas in 2022. 

Her Penguin edition of Joyce's Poems is in press, and she is currently completing a monograph on the Textual Culture of the Irish Literary Revival. Earlier work included editing Volume Five of the Oxford History of the Irish Book (2011).