Damian Maher

D.Phil. in English
Thesis title: Henry James among the Moral Philosophers
Supervisor: Dr Patrick Hayes

I completed an undergraduate dual degree in Arts (majoring in English and History) and Economics at the University of Queensland in Australia. There, I wrote my honours thesis on W. H. Auden’s (another transatlantic writer) The Sea and the Mirror and the poetics of restraint and liberalism that it invoked. I completed my masters, in Modern and Contemporary Literature, here at the University of Oxford. My thesis examined Lionel Trilling’s readings of E. M. Forster’s novels. I traced the limits of, and Trilling’s frustrations with, his genteel liberal criticism against Forster’s novels, where it would otherwise seem so apt. Alongside my PhD, I have helped convene the Modern and Contemporary Literature Seminar; I host a reading group themed around Desire; and I will be a Stipendiary Lecture at Balliol College in Hilary Term of this year.