Born in New York City, Jim Fairhall received his Ph.D. degree from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Formerly director of the M.A. Program in English and the Irish Studies Program, Jim has served for the past several years on DePaul's Academic Program Review Committee.
Jim's writing interests have been divided between scholarship and creative writing. As a scholar, he has published on James Joyce and history; currently he is working on ecocritical approaches to Joyce. He has lectured at the James Joyce Summer School in Dublin.
As a creative writer, he has published a poetry chapbook and a full-length collection of poems. Currently he is working on a collection of stories titled Perfume River.
Jim's teaching interests center on modern Irish and British literature; they also include the literature of war and American environmental writing. His main goal as a teacher is to impart a sense of the complex pleasures of literature esthetic, emotional and intellectual which make reading at its best a powerful, unique experience.