Mary Cregan

Mary Cregan’s interests include the novel from the nineteenth century to the present, women’s writing, and Irish writing. She has taught a range of courses including the Modern Novel, the Victorian Novel, Modernism, Critical Writing, Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury Culture, Modern Irish Literature, Women and Culture, and First Year Seminar.

Her dissertation, Uncommon Reader, looked at Virginia Woolf’s entry into authorship in the context of Victorian debates about reading, women’s education, and the literary tradition. She has written about books and reading for the Financial Times and The Chronicle of Higher Education. For several Random House imprints, she has written reading guides to the work of Tolstoy, Faulkner, Pamuk, Munro, McEwan, García-Márquez, Némirovsky, Ishiguro, and many other authors of fiction and nonfiction.

She is the author of The Scar, A Personal History of Depression and Recovery, published by W. W. Norton. Part memoir, part cultural history, the book addresses the complex condition known as depression, examining its changing diagnostic and cultural meanings over time as well as the psychiatric profession’s efforts to define, treat, and manage a syndrome whose physiological causes are only beginning to be understood. She is currently writing a book about the Irish revolutionary period and the legacy of her four grandparents, who left Ireland in the 1920s.