• Study here
    • Study here
    • Undergraduates
    • Graduates
    • Visiting students
    • Outreach with schools and colleges
  • Living here
    • Living here
    • Where you will live
    • Eating here
    • Library & resources
    • Chapel & Faith
    • Do what you love
    • Help is on hand
  • Our people
  • News, events and more
    • News, events and more
    • Our vision for 2030
    • News
    • Events
    • Hertford history
    • Rare books & Archives
    • International Programmes
    • Conferences & events
    • Governance & legal
    • Vacancies
    • Visit us
    • Contact us
  • Hertford Intranet
  • International Programmes
    • International Programmes
    • Directors’ welcome
    • Our programmes
    • Our partnerships
    • Life in Oxford
    • Hertford in Asia
    • How to apply
  • Alumni
    • Alumni
    • Hertford today
    • Meet the Hertfordians
    • Publications
    • Alumni societies
    • Alumni FAQs
    • Update your details
    • Meet the Development team
  • Support us
    • Support us
    • Give to Hertford
    • Fundraising priorities
    • Leave a legacy
    • For donors
  • Contact us
xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">
  • Hertford Intranet
  • International Programmes
    • International Programmes
    • Directors’ welcome
    • Our programmes
    • Our partnerships
    • Life in Oxford
    • Hertford in Asia
    • How to apply
  • Alumni
    • Alumni
    • Hertford today
    • Meet the Hertfordians
    • Publications
    • Alumni societies
    • Alumni FAQs
    • Update your details
    • Meet the Development team
  • Support us
    • Support us
    • Give to Hertford
    • Fundraising priorities
    • Leave a legacy
    • For donors
  • Contact us
  • Study here
  • Living here
  • Our people
  • News, events and more

Study here  ›

  • Undergraduates
  • Graduates
  • Visiting students
  • Outreach with schools and colleges

Living here  ›

  • Where you will live
  • Eating here
  • Library & resources
  • Chapel & Faith
  • Do what you love
  • Help is on hand

News, events and more  ›

  • Our vision for 2030
  • News
  • Events
  • Hertford history
  • Rare books & Archives
  • International Programmes
  • Conferences & events
  • Governance & legal
  • Vacancies
  • Visit us
  • Contact us
Home / Our people / Professor David Dwan

Professor David Dwan

Tutorial Fellow in English

Professor of English Literature and Intellectual History

david.dwan@hertford.ox.ac.uk

David Dwan joined Hertford in 2014.  Before this he held lectureships at Queen Mary (University of London), Queen’s University Belfast and the University of York.

Undergraduate teaching

At Hertford David teaches the first-year papers on literature from 1830 to 1910 and 1910 to the present, alongside FHS Paper 5. He also lectures in these areas for the English Faculty.

Graduate teaching

David contributes to the MSt on post-1900 literature and offers a course on the philosophical elements of modernism.

  • Research interests

    David’s research addresses the relationship between literature and intellectual history (particularly moral and political philosophy) from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. He has a particular interest in Irish writing. His first book – The Great Community (Field Day, 2008) – examined the evolution of cultural nationalism in Ireland. W. B. Yeats was the central figure of the book, but he also considered some of his most important intellectual influences, from Edmund Burke to the Young Ireland movement of the 1840s. Since then David has co-edited (with Christopher Insole) The Cambridge Companion to Edmund Burke and published articles on a variety of figures from Rousseau to Woolf. His monograph Liberty, Equality and Humbug: Orwell’s Political Ideals was published by Oxford University Press in 2018.

  • Publications

    Books

    • Liberty, Equality and Humbug: Orwell’s Political Ideals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018)
    • Co-Editor (with Chris Insole), The Cambridge Companion to Edmund Burke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012)
    • The Great Community: Culture and Nationalism in Ireland (Dublin: Field Day/Notre Dame, 2008)

    Recent articles and book chapters

    • ‘Orwell and Humanism’ in The Cambridge Companion to Nineteen Eighty-Four, ed. Nathan Waddell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 64-78
    • ‘The Prejudices of Enlightenment’ in Irish Literature in Transition, 1700-1780, ed. Moyra Haslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 91-109
    • ‘Important Nonsense: Yeats and Symbolism’, New Literary History, 50.2 (2019): 219-43
    • (with Emilie Morin), ‘Introduction’, International Yeats Studies: Yeats and Mass Communications, 3.1 (2018): 1-13
    • ‘Romantic Nationalism: History and Illusion in Ireland,’ Modern Intellectual History, 14.3 (2017): 717-45
    • ‘Young Ireland to Yeats’, The Princeton History of Modern Ireland, ed. Richard Bourke and Ian McBride (Princeton, 2016): 217-35
    • ‘The Problem of Romanticism in Wyndham Lewis’, Essays in Criticism, 65.2 (2015): pp. 163-86
    • ‘Modernism and Rousseau’, Textual Practice, 27.4 (2013): pp. 537-63
    • ‘Orwell’s Paradox: Equality in Animal Farm’, ELH, 79.3(2012): pp. 655-83
    • ‘Burke and Utility’ in The Cambridge Companion to Edmund Burke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 131-44
    • (with Chris Insole) ‘Introduction: Philosophy in Action’ in The Cambridge Companion to Edmund Burke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012): pp. 1-15
    • ‘Edmund Burke and the Emotions’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 72.4 (2011): pp. 571-93
    • ‘Truth and Freedom in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four’, Philosophy and Literature, 34.2 (2010): pp. 381-93
    • ‘Yeats’s Thought’ in Visions and Revisions: W. B. Yeats (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2010): pp. 109-26
    • ‘Woolf, Scepticism and Manners’, Textual Practice, 22.2 (2008): pp. 249-68
    • ‘Civic Virtue in the Modern World: The Politics of Young Ireland’, Irish Political Studies, 22.1 (2007): pp. 35-60
    • ‘Abstract Hatred: Yeats and the Counter-Revolutionary Paradigm’, Literature and History, 15.1 (2006): pp. 18-36
    • ‘Young Ireland and the Horde of Benthamy’ in Politics and Power in Victorian Ireland, ed. Roger Swift and Christine Kinealy (Dublin: Four Courts, 2006): pp. 109-18
    • ‘Culture and Democracy in Ireland’, Irish Review, 32 (2004): pp. 23-38
    • ‘That Ancient Sect: Yeats, Hegel, and the Possibility of Epic in Ireland’, Irish Studies Review, 12.2 (2004): pp. 201-11
    • ‘Idle Talk: Ontology and Mass Communications in Heidegger’, New Formations, 51 (2003): pp. 113-27
    • ‘Yeats, Heidegger and the Problem of Modern Subjectivism’, Paragraph, 25.1 (2002): pp. 74-91

Academic

  • Principal

  • Tutors & Lecturers

  • Visiting Student Lecturers

  • Professorial & Research Fellows

  • Visiting Fellows

  • Emeritus Fellows

Study here

  • Undergraduates
  • Graduates
  • Visiting students
  • Outreach with schools and colleges

Living here

  • Where you will live
  • Eating here
  • Library & resources
  • Chapel & Faith
  • Do what you love
  • Help is on hand

Our people

  • Our people

News, events and more

  • Our vision for 2030
  • News
  • Events
  • Hertford history
  • Rare books & Archives
  • International Programmes
  • Conferences & events
  • Governance & legal
  • Vacancies
  • Visit us
  • Contact us

Follow us

Hertford College
Catte Street
Oxford
OX1 3BW


Tel: +44 (0)1865 279 400

© 2025 Hertford College Registered Charity No. 1137527

  • Contact us
  • Privacy
  • Legal

Site by Franks and Franks