:: Associate Professor
:: Office: 641 Clemens Hall
:: Phone: 645-2066, ext. 1098
:: E-mail: irlam@buffalo.edu
:: Personal Website: http://wings.buffalo.edu/AandL/col/faculty/irlam/
:: UB Study Abroad | Destination: South Africa

Shaun Irlam is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature. He grew up in Cape Town, South Africa and holds an M.A. in English literature from the University of Cape Town. His M.A. thesis on Thomas Pynchon was completed under the guidance of the South African novelist, J.M. Coetzee. Shaun Irlam came to the United States in 1985 and completed a Ph.D in Comparative Literature at the Humanities Center of the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. His teaching and research interests include 18th-century cultural studies and aesthetics in England and France, current critical theory with an emphasis on deconstruction, and postcolonial literature and theory with emphasis on Caribbean and African literatures.

He recently completed a book that explores the fortunes of sentiment in British poetry and aesthetic theory after the Civil War. imageThis project undertakes several interconnected tasks: it proposes to rewrite the literary history of a particular period in English literature around the politics and literature of Enthusiasm; it accomplishes this by revisiting and reconsidering early eighteenth-century aesthetic theory as well as the poetry of two major poets hugely popular in the eighteenth century: James Thomson and Edward Young; it explores the genesis and construction of moral authority through a variety of competing discourses appropriated by poetry; and it traces the rehabilitation of languages of sentiment in the period between the English Civil War and the American Revolution. Entitled Elations: The Poetics of Enthusiasm in Eighteenth-Century Britain, it traces the gradual transformation and muting of religious Enthusiasm, functioning as a vehicle for political discontent, into more socially acceptable forms as poetic Enthusiasm. The book was published by Stanford University Press in 1999. He has also published on the 18th century Caribbean poet, James Grainger. His most recent work has appeared in South Atlantic Quarterly on postapartheid South African literature and nationhood.

Shaun Irlam is currently working on a new project that investigates adaptations of poetry and literary discourses to imperial ideology. He's also developing a third project on postcolonial African fiction and human geography and has published some of this work on Mariama Bā and Sony Labou Tansi. He has lived in the United States for 15 years, where he's still trying to make sense of American culture!