Jennifer Orr

Dr Jennifer Orr is Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature at Newcastle University. She completed her doctoral thesis at the University of Glasgow which revises the life and works of the Irish poet Samuel Thomson (1766-1816) and his early romantic period circle of fellow poets and intellectuals. Her monograph, drawn from this research, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in a monograph titled Literary Networks and Irish Dissenting Print Culture in August 2015. She has taught English Literature at the Universities of Oxford, Glasgow and Newcastle from Medieval to modern poetry. At Newcastle she is beginning research into northern working-class poetry associated particularly with the North East industrial landscape, funded by the Newcastle Institute for Social Renewal. Her recent publications include studies of United Irish poetry, the contemporary and critical reception of Scottish and Irish literature and culture, romantic poetic circles and their historical context in Britain and Ireland during the 'long' eighteenth century. She is the editor of Four Courts publication 'Fostering an Irish Writer's Circle: the correspondence of Samuel Thomson (1766-1816)' which is the first collected edition of the letters of Thomson and his circle.