Clodagh Heffernan is a working-class scholar and a first-generation academic from Ireland. She completed a bachelor’s degree in English and History at Maynooth University in 2018, and she achieved a First-Class Honours master’s degree in Irish Writing and Film from University College Cork in 2021. Clodagh recently began her PhD project at UCC under the title Protest Writing and Dissent Culture in Contemporary Working-Class Ireland: Poetics of Defiance, supervised by Dr Heather Laird and Dr Adam Hanna. Her PhD combines Gramscian Marxism with working-class autoethnographic reflections to illuminate the subversive aesthetic and conceptual qualities of the work of Irish writers who self-identify as working class. Clodagh’s work focuses on working-class Irish poetry, hip hop, crime fiction, and unpublished community writing from the neoliberal period in Ireland (1980 – present), examining the representation of working-class interactions with state forces such as the systems of social welfare, policing, education, and public arts funding bodies. Her research interests include working-class studies, the intersections between literary form and content, Irish social policy, genre fiction, traditional and alternative poetic forms, hip hop studies, Marxism, and cultural theories.
