Professor Clare Hutton

  • Research and Innovation Director (English)
  • Professor of Literature and Book History

Clare is a literary scholar and book historian, and has a particular interest in Irish Literature, and the culture of contemporary literary prizes (such as the Booker). She joined Loughborough University as a Lecturer in 2004, advancing to Senior Lecturer in 2015, Reader in 2020 and Professor in 2024.  Clare has three children (born 2003, 2005 and 2007) and worked part-time between 2008 and 2016.

Clare would be very happy to hear from prospective PhD students who share any of her research interests. 

Academic Career

  • 2004-onwards: Loughborough University
  • 2000-2004: AHRB Research Fellow, Institute of English Studies, University of London (Project: ‘The History of the Book in Ireland, 1891-2000’)
  • 1998-1999: Munby Fellow in Bibliography, University of Cambridge
  • 1999: DPhil, University of Oxford (Thesis: ‘Publishing the Literary Revival: The Evolution of Irish Textual Culture, 1886-1922’)
  • 1995: MSt, University of Oxford (Research Methods in English)
  • 1993: MPhil, Trinity College Dublin (Anglo-Irish Literature, Distinction)
  • 1992: BA (Hons), Royal Holloway, University of London (English, First Class Honours)

Professional Responsibilities, Awards and Visiting Fellowships

  • Princeton University Library Fellowship, September 2023
  • External Examiner, National University of Ireland Galway (from June 2023)
  • Member of the UKRI Talent Panel College (from December 2022)
  • Exhibition Curator and Visiting Fellow, Harry Ransom Center for the Humanities, University of Texas (April-June 2022)
  • Member of the QAA Advisory Group for English (2021-2022)
  • Trustee of the International James Joyce Foundation (from October 2020)
  • Long Room Hub Visiting Fellow, Trinity College Dublin (February 2020)
  • Andrew Mellon Research Fellow, Harry Ransom Center for the Humanities, University of Texas (September 2019)
  • James Joyce Research Fellow, SUNY Buffalo (February 2013)
  • Leverhulme Research Fellowship, 2009-2012
  • Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (since 2008)
  • Bibliographical Society of America, New Scholars Award, 2003

Clare began her research career by completing a doctorate on the publishing history of the Irish Literary Revival.  Her research looked in detail at the movement which brought Irish writing to a world audience, and facilitated the careers of two major authors with sustaining critical appeal: W. B. Yeats and James Joyce.  This laid the foundation for two monographs: Serial Encounters: Ulysses and the Little Review (Oxford University Press, 2019) and Yeats, Joyce and the Textual Culture of the Irish Literary Revival (in progress, and under contract with OUP).

Serial Encounters: Ulysses and the Little Review is an original study of James Joyce’s Ulysses, and looks at the critical and textual significance of the way in which Joyce’s evolving work was first serialised.  Joyce never visited the US, but Ulysses was first published in New York in the Little Review between 1918 and 1920. Serial Encounters investigates the initial reception of Joyce’s iconic work, and argues that the circumstances in which the work was first written and read shaped the final product.  The study is based on detailed archival work in numerous US research libraries.

Building on this, Clare curated Women and the Making of Joyce’s Ulysses, a major exhibition which explored the formative and facilitating role which women played in enabling the realisation of Ulysses.  The exhibition was on display at the Harry Ransom Center for the Humanities, University of Texas at Austin during 2022, the centenary of the publication of Ulysses in volume form.  In related work, Clare participated in the BBC Arena Ulysses (2022) and lectured at the British Library on ‘Finding Miss Weaver: James Joyce and the Patron of Ulysses

Yeats, Joyce and the Textual Culture of the Irish Literary Revival investigates the general conditions of textual culture in Ireland between 1892 and 1922.  The Literary Revival underpinned the foundations of Irish cultural nationalism and saw the publication of works such as Yeats’s Responsibilities (Cuala Press, 1914), Joyce’s Dubliners (Grant Richards, 1914), Synge’s Playboy of the Western World (Maunsel, 1907) and O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars (Macmillan, 1926). This monograph will consider what can one learn from examining the original circumstances in which these major works were published and read. It will also consider how the specifics of these case studies relate to a more general history of Irish textual culture during the period.

What links Clare’s two monographs is an interest in book history and three simple but important questions: how literary texts get written (the question of authorship), how, where, when and why they are read (the questions of reading and reception), and how, when, and by whom are they published (the question of publishing). Clare’s recent research has involved applying these questions to the contemporary period and looking at the annual process of the Booker Prize as an instance of literary history in formation.

Other current research and writing projects include:

  • Editing Joyce’s Poems for Penguin
  • An article for the Princeton University Library Chronicle based on recent archival research (‘Networks of Association: The Letters and Legacies of Harriet Shaw Weaver and Sylvia Beach’)

Clare’s research has been funded by the AHRC, the Leverhulme Trust and the British Academy.

Clare teaches broadly across the literary curriculum and has particular interests in Irish Literature (especially James Joyce and W. B. Yeats), the history of the book (particularly publishing history and textual criticism) and Modernism.  Recent work, contributing to the MA in Contemporary Literature and Culture, looks at the relationship between the market for books, the literary canon, and the business of literary prizes. 

Clare has been a pioneer in teaching digital literary studies, and was awarded a Research Informed Teaching Award in 2020.  Recent teaching has involved looking at the annual process of the Booker Prize (as it happens in real time, during the Autumn) and requires students to engage with what might be termed the ‘hyper contemporary’, the just-published and prize-winning literature of now.

Current Students

  • Lucy Brennan, ‘Ulysses, Feminism and Visual Culture’
  • Andrea Goldstraw, ‘Poetic Convention and Tradition in the Work of Louis MacNeice’
  • Jiaxin Zhang, ‘Complete Song Ci: A Digital Collection of Song Dynasty Chinese Poetry’

 Recent Students

  • Amelia Mills, ‘The Translatress in her Own Person Speaks: Aphra Behn’s Reframed Dynamics of Love, Seduction and Courtship’ (2023)
  • Leah Henrickson, ‘Towards a New Sociology of the Text: The Hermeneutics of Algorithmic Authorship’ (2019)
  • 2024: ‘Finding Miss Weaver: James Joyce and the Patron of Ulysses, in Nicola Wilson (ed), The Edinburgh Companion to Women in Publishing, 1900-2000 (Edinburgh University Press).
  • 2023: ‘Elizabeth Yeats, Reveries over Childhood and Youth and Material Circumstance’, International Yeats Studies, 7(1), 15-40.
  • 2022: Women and the Making of Ulysses: A History in Ten Objects (available here). 
  • 2019: Serial Encounters: Ulysses and the Little Review (Oxford University Press).
  • 2014: ‘The Development of Ulysses in Print, 1918-1922’, The Dublin James Joyce Journal, 6/7, 109-131.
  • 2011: Editor, The Irish Book in English, 1891–2000 (Oxford University Press).
  • 2003: ‘Chapters of Moral History: Failing to Publish Dubliners’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 97 (2003), 495–519.
  • 2003: ‘Joyce and the Institutions of Revivalism’, Irish University Review, 33 (2003), 117-132.