Ithaca College

Kevin Murphy, Professor in the Department of English, has had his essay, “Heaney Translating Heaney: Coupling and Uncoupling the Human Chain,” accepted for publication by Texas Studies in Literature and Language.  Murphy’s essay focuses on Seamus Heaney’s use of translation in his final volume of poems, Human Chain, to address critical elements in his poetic formation.

Heaney's poetry is a subject to which Murphy has returned consistently in his research and teaching.  The present essay is based on a talk he gave at the Seamus Heaney International Commemoration and Conference held at Queens University, Belfast, in April 2014.  This followed from two articles (in 2007 and 2012) on recent Heaney poetry collections, and helped to inspire a semester-long senior seminar on Heaney that Murphy taught in the spring of 2015.

Murphy has also been active in other areas of Irish literature.  At the invitation of the curator of the Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia, this past summer Murphy took part in the June 16 Bloomsday Festival honoring James Joyce’s Ulysses, a manuscript copy of which is owned by the museum.  As part of the public readings of the novel taking place throughout the day across the city, Murphy read from the Ithaca episode of the novel at the Trinity Center in downtown Philadelphia.

Kevin Murphy joined the Department of English at Ithaca College in 1979.  His areas of research are primarily Irish and American literature, and he teaches courses in Irish literature and modern poetry as well as senior seminars on Heaney, Yeats, and Joyce.