Nicholas Taylor-Collins, FRHistS, FHEA

I am Senior Lecturer in English at Cardiff Metropolitan University. My research focuses on literary ethics and death studies, exploring how literature enables ethical engagement with mortality, memory, and human finitude. Through reading, writing, and criticism, I investigate how literary texts shape our understanding of what it means to live, judge, and die.

My current work develops a theory of literary death-ethics and examines the relationship between mortality and ethical responsibility across modern and contemporary literature. A major strand of this research centres on John Banville's fiction. I am currently completing Affirming Life and Guarding Death in John Banville's Fiction (Bloomsbury, under contract) and co-editing John Banville in Context for Cambridge University Press.

My recent research also explores mortality as an ethical category in science fiction, the relationship between consciousness and the death-drive, and the significance of death for literary theory and criticism. More broadly, I am interested in the ethical possibilities of literature and the ways literary texts challenge philosophical understandings of human experience.

My earlier work focused on modern and contemporary Irish literature, Shakespeare, memory, and intertextuality. In Shakespeare, Memory, and Modern Irish Literature (Manchester University Press, 2023), I developed the concept of 'dismemory' to explain how Irish writers transform Shakespeare's texts through acts of remembrance and forgetting. I have also published on literary value, contemporary reading practices, and Irish literary culture (Judge for Yourself (Routledge, 2020)).

I welcome enquiries from prospective postgraduate researchers interested in literary ethics, death studies, Irish literature, John Banville, Shakespeare studies, literary theory, and the philosophy of literature. I am Treasurer of the British Association for Irish Studies, a Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Death and Society, University of Bath, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.