Hello and welcome to my website! I am an Irish born historian and literary author living in the United States. I am now retired from teaching. I taught and lectured on Irish history, modern and ancient, and on Irish literary figures. I taught at Johns Hopkins University and lectured at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC. I am also a consultant on Irish history and was the chief historical advisor for PBS and RTÉ (Irish television service) on a 3 part documentary series on early Ireland called In Search of Ancient Ireland, which was filmed entirely on location in Ireland and featured many ancient sites and interviews with Irish scholars. I co-authored the book to the TV series which has the same title. As a sequel I also wrote a later history of Ireland – In Search of Ireland’s Heroes – which begins in the twelfth century with the first English incursions and ends in the modern age.
One of the purposes of setting up this site is to publish here my original bi-yearly Wild About Wilde publications on the life and work of Oscar Wilde. I edited and published these newsletters in hard copy between 1986 and 1996 before we had the internet, and I want to now make them available to modern readers in electronic form. Wild About Wilde had a wide international following both in readership and in contributions. In those days the post office was the main source of communication and I would carry box loads of the latest publication to mail out to individual subscribers, bookshops and libraries. I was very fortunate to have many quality contributors during those years which makes them a valuable resource in the study of Wilde’s whole body of work. Wild About Wilde Newsletter has the honour of being recognised and listed by the Modern Language Association (MLA) in the International Bibliography and the Directory of Periodicals under the acronym WAWN. The MLA is the professional association in the United States for scholars of language and literature.
I hope Wilde enthusiasts will enjoy reading these articles and essays written by scholars from all over the world – and those who have maybe never known very much about Wilde will become better acquainted with him and the intriguingly broad range of his work.
Carmel McCaffrey
Contact me via email: WAWN1986@gmail.com
Literature and History of Ireland 