“Why do we read novels and why do we write novels? We live inside of our heads, which is a place of dreams and fantasies and wishes and desires, but we live out our lives in this shared real world,” says Barry McCrea, the Donald R. Keough Family Professor of Irish Studies in Notre Dame’s Department of English. “Novels offer us not just a map of the human mind but a way to understand how the individual human mind interacts with the world outside.”
McCrea joined Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters in fall 2012. His research focuses on modern literature in English, French, Irish, Italian, and Spanish. His first novel, The First Verse, won the 2006 Ferro-Grumley prize for fiction.
