Maebh Long


Maebh Long is an Irish academic with expertise on the modernist novelist and playwright Flann O’Brien. She is currently Senior Lecturer in the English Programme in the School of Arts at The University of Waikato in New Zealand, having been a Senior Lecturer and Deputy Head of School at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji.

Education and career

She obtained her BA in English and German and MA in English at University College Cork in Ireland and her PhD on "Derrida and a Theory of Irony: Parabasis and Parataxis" at the University of Durham in England.
Her research and teaching focus on modernist and contemporary literature from Ireland, Britain, and Oceania. She is also interested in Literary Theory, the History of Medicine, and Continental Philosophy. She has been influenced by Jacques Derrida and by Pacific Island literature.
Long has also written about the effect of climate change on sea level rise, particularly as it affects South Pacific island nations.

Flann O’Brien

Long is an expert on the Irish novelist and playwright Flann O’Brien and has published two award winning books on him. She has significantly impacted wider recognition of O'Brien's work. Joseph Booker called The Collected Letters of Flann O’Brien, "a major event in the documentation of modern Ireland's history. The most significant publication by Brian O'Nolan since the belated arrival in print of The Third Policeman." The Irish Studies Review said, "Reading Maebh Long's recent book, Assembling Flann O'Brien, one cannot help thinking that the poor fellow is finally getting the attention he deserves." Assembling Flann O'Brien won the 2015 International Flan O'Brien Society's "Best book length study on a Brian O’Nolan theme" In 2019 The Collected Letters of Flann O’Brien won the corresponding 2019 award.

Selected publications