Paddy Lyons

Paddy Lyons is Senior Lecturer in English Literature. Before coming to Scotland he taught in Ireland, at Trinity College Dublin and at the National College of Art, and in England, at the University of East Anglia. More recently, he has taught in the US, at Dartmouth College New Hampshire, where he was Visiting Professor in 1999; and in Poland, at the University of Warsaw, where he was on secondment 1994-97, and where he holds a personal professorship.

He has specialised in the poetry and drama of the Restoration - in particular: Rochester and Congreve. He maintains a strong commitment to Literary Theory, on which he has lectured widely, and was one of the last translators of Althusser into English to be authorised by Althusser during that philosopher's lifetime; his ongoing work on inter-relations between the literary and the history of literacy is conducted in an Althusserian perspective. He has been active, too, in promoting women's writing: he is editor of the widely-used 1818 text of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and (with the actress and novelist Fidelis Morgan) of Female Playwrights of the Restoration. He contributes to the faculty courses in comparative literature; and has written on a range of twentieth and twenty-first century writing: poetry, fiction, drama, and the cinema of Pedro Almodovar.