Melissa Fegan is a Reader in English at the University of Chester. Born in Lisburn, she spent her childhood in Shannon, Co. Clare before moving back to Lisburn in her early teens. She did her BA and DPhil at St Hugh's College, Oxford; her DPhil thesis was on representations of the Great Famine in literature, and was supervised by Roy Foster. Dr Fegan teaches nineteenth-century literature and Irish literature, and is programme leader of the MA in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture. She has written extensively about the famine period. Her publications include Literature and the Irish Famine 1845-1919 (Oxford University Press, 2002) and ‘William Carleton and the Great Famine’ in Peter Gray (ed.), Victoria’s Ireland?: Ireland and Britishness, 1837-1901 (Four Courts Press, 2004).