Sarah Upton

I previously studied at Trinity College Dublin, where I completed a BA in English Literature and Classical Civilisations, followed by an MPhil in Irish Writing. I held a Constantia Maxwell Faculty Scholarship and received a distinction for my master's dissertation on Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin's coastal poetic. After spending a number of years training and working as a bookseller in Dublin I returned to graduate study, beginning my PhD at the Faculty of English in Cambridge under the supervision of Dr Josie O'Donoghue. My doctoral project titled 'Ecology, Place and the Subject in Contemporary Irish Poetry’ is generously funded by an OOC AHRC DTP Studentship. I am also the current secretary of the Cambridge Group for Irish Studies. 

My doctoral project describes an 'ecological' relationship between the poetic subject and their environment in the work of Seamus Heaney, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Sinéad Morrissey, Mary O'Malley and Stephen Sexton, that attends to the 'micro-scale' phenomena involved in dwelling amidst Ireland's coasts, bogs, islands and cities. I am interested in how place-specific details and non-human presences are encountered, perceived, and connected in a poem to register the structures of larger realities like global climate disaster and the pandemic.