Dr Ciarán Kavanagh
FWO Postdoctoral Researcher, Ghent University
Contact Details
Ciaran.Kavanagh [at] ugent.beCiaran.Kavanagh [at] umail.ucc.ie
Please feel free to reach out if with access requests for articles. Sometimes emails fall prey to overzealous firewalls, so feel free to double email me if I don't get back to you.
Research Summary
I hold a PhD in English Literature, specialising in Reader-Response Theory, which was awarded in 2019 by University College Cork. My first book, Refiguring Reader-Response, is due out with University of Nebraska Press in 2027.I am currently an associated researcher at Ghent University, where I recently finished a three-year FWO postdoctoral project on the concept of seriousness in science fiction's discursive cultures.I will soon begin an International Fellowship at the KWI Essen, where I am developing a new project on awe emotions in science fiction and its reception.My research is broadly covered by the keywords of science/speculative fiction; genre theory; general critical theory; reader-response; contemporary literature; narratology; ecocriticism; embodiment and affect; and postmodernism.
See below for Past Projects and Recent Publications
Refiguring Reader-ResponseMy first monograph, Refiguring Reader-Response: Experience and Interpretation in Contemporary Fiction, is under contract with University of Nebraska Press's Frontiers of Narrative series. It is due for publication in 2026.The theory developed in Refiguring Reader-Response is defining of my academic work. Here, I aim to revitalise and refigure reader-response theory, building on the tradition developed in the 1960s through 1980s by theorists such as Stanley Fish, Judith Fetterley and Wolfgang Iser. Refiguring Reader-Response offers a significant theoretical contribution through establishing frameworks to situate the validity and significance claims of reader-oriented interpretation within the contexts of modern critical theory. More than this, it exercises these frameworks in comprehensive case-studies that analyse texts’ affordances for particular interpretations with respect to the interpretive tools and aims of different reading communities.
Science Fiction and SeriousnessMy FWO-funded postdoctoral project, Science Fiction and Seriousness, aims to understand the different ways in which the concept of seriousness in SF proliferates through, and impacts on, the reading, writing and discussion of the genre. It understands seriousness as a negotiated concept, and therefore looks to SF’s discursive culture to understand how the idea of 'serious SF' is differently created and used by different reading communities.As I have recently argued, seriousness is a ‘problematic’ in SF: a meta-concern that comes to the fore in arguments around the genre’s functions as, for example, estranging, inuring or oracular, or through its connection to science. I specify it as a problematic to denote that ‘seriousness’ is not a problem to be solved, but an attentional quality that requires constant negotiation. We must consider what it means to be serious, to endow serious attention, to court it, apportion it, or, as in the case above, argue against the seriousness of an issue.
Recent Publications“Science Fiction and the Problem(atic) of Seriousness” is a theoretically ambitious work that argues that SF’s discursive culture has been overly-defined by attention to the genre’s didactic capabilities, that is, its essentially extra-literary qualities such as its connection to science, ability to estrange, its warning function, or its u/dys-topianism. I thus provide a new understanding of the critical contexts of literary seriousness, what so-called serious attention looks like to different interpretive communities, and what it means for a speculative work—an imagined future—to be deemed serious.“Slow, Complex, Dull? Climate Boredom and Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future” also emerges from this research, and focuses on an affective facet of so-called ‘serious SF’: boredom. Here I establish an understanding of boredom—or its threat—as a key literary experience, particularly in the context of climate change, which can dull our experiences of the world and which, importantly, may require boring work to solve.