Trained as a scholar of modern Irish literature, I work as the editor of a not-for-profit cultural archive, a university lecturer in literary history, and writer of various things.

As Managing Editor of The Public Domain Review, I commission our feature essays and collections.

As a freelance literary journalist, I have written for The Economist, Times Literary Supplement, History Today, and a few other places.

I published my first book with The Atlantic and Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series. It tracks real and metaphorical signatures across cave paintings, tattoo fantasies in hip-hop, and epigenetic research. Jonathan Lethem kindly called it “a true ‘essay film’ of a book”.

In my academic life, I’ve published on Samuel Beckett’s obsession with pots, the territoriality of nightingales in Ovid, Marie de France, and T. S. Eliot, biblical allegory in cold war cinema, and James Joyce’s influence on Seamus Heaney.

As University Lecturer of English Literature, I led masters seminars and undergraduate lecture courses on literary theory, the pastoral, literature of contagion, and postcolonialism at Tampere University.

Before that, I was a Junior Research Fellow at Peterhouse, Cambridge, where I hosted an invited speaker series called The Theory Group and lectured on various papers.

I completed my Ph.D., also at Peterhouse, under the supervision of Steven Connor in 2018.

Before that, I lived in California. Now I live in Helsinki with Emma and cat named Huxley.

Feel free to email me if you want to work together or simply correspond: hunterdukes [at] gmail.