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.

Her book The Scar (W. W. Norton; Lilliput Press 2019) is a blend of memoir and cultural history about depression, examining its changing diagnostic and cultural meanings as well as the psychiatric profession’s efforts to define, treat, and manage a syndrome whose physiological causes remain poorly understood.