Author Philip McGowan

Philip McGowan

Philip McGowan is Professor of American Literature at Queen’s University Belfast and the President of the European Association for American Studies, with research and teaching interests in twentieth-century American poetry, contemporary American fiction, and film. He also has wider interests in revolutionary America, the American nineteenth century, westerns, and American narratives of addiction and alcohol control. In the field of poetry, his teaching and research focuses on Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, the Middle Generation poets, and Mark Doty.

A Backward Glance: My Quarter Century in the IAAS

Philip McGowan

Articles, Issue 9 2020

Rather than inflict another piece of my torturous critical prose on anyone, I have opted for a more personal reflection on some of the Association’s history as it has intersected with my own academic career to ... Read More...

Review: Stephen Burt, the poem is you: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them

Philip McGowan

Issue 6 2017, Reviews

Burt, Stephen. the poem is you: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them. The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 2016. 432 pages. ISBN 9780674737877. Buy here. Over the course of any given year, I recei... Read More...

Last Vegas?

Philip McGowan

Articles, Issue 3 2014

This article, and the research out of which it springs, has a number of points of origin; it may also have more than one point of conclusion even as it argues that the current manifestation of Las Vegas could w... Read More...

Satire, Symbolism, and the "Working Through" of Historical Ghosts in The Confidence-Man

Cold Reality: Revisions of War in John Knowles’ ‘Phineas’ and A Separate Peace

The State Department’s Northern Ireland Special Envoys and the redemption of the Good Friday Agreement

“a settled place”: Reproductive Performance in the Liberties and The Liberties

‘The Ethics of Quantum Colonialism’: Navigating American Racial Anxiety in N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became

“‘Normal People’ Indeed!”: Anne Tyler, Sally Rooney, and the Narrative of Youthful Quirk

Depictions of Shame: White Identity and Cultural Blackness in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner

Review: Christian Schmidt, Postblack Aesthetics: The Freedom to be Black in Contemporary African American Fiction.

Review: Baumgartner, South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War

Review: Katherine Manthorne, Restless Enterprise: The Art and Life of Eliza Pratt Greatorex.

Review: Austenfeld, ed., Robert Lowell in a New Century

Review: Wills, Gamer Nation: Video Games and American Culture

Review: Sawires-Masseli, Arab American Novels Post-9/11: Classical Storytelling Motifs against Outsidership

Review: Wickham Clayton, ed, Style and Form in the Hollywood Slasher Film

The IAAS's Americanista: An Interview with Catherine Gander (IAAS Chair)

From Mitchelstown to Michigan: Kevin Roche’s Formative Years

A Backward Glance: My Quarter Century in the IAAS

Review: Stephen Burt, the poem is you: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them

Last Vegas?