Born in Greenwich Village, 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, he has served recently on DePaul's Appeals Committee and the English Department’s Personnel Committee.
Jim's writing interests are divided between scholarship and creative writing. As a scholar, he has published on James Joyce and history; currently, his article on ecocriticism is in the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to James Joyce. He has lectured at the James Joyce Summer School in Dublin.
As a creative writer, Jim has published a poetry chapbook and a full-length collection of poems and twelve short stories. His story “Pink” won the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival Fiction Award out of over 600 entries. Currently, he is completing a full-length novel titled Perfume River.
Jim's teaching interests center on modern Irish and British literature; they also include courses on the Sixties and on 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.