Publications

Monographs

– Irish Modernism and the Politics of Sexual Health (Oxford University Press, 2023).

Irish Modernism and the Politics of Sexual Health explores the politicized role of sexual health as a concept, discourse, and subject of debate within Irish literary culture from 1880 to 1960. Combining perspectives from Irish Studies, Modernist Studies, and the Social History of Medicine, it traces the ways in which authors, politicians, and activists in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ireland harnessed debates over sexual hygiene, venereal disease, birth control, fertility, and eugenics to envisage competing models of Irish identity, culture, and political community. Analyzing the work of canonical authors (Yeats, Synge, Shaw, Joyce, Beckett, Flann O’Brien) and less often discussed figures (George Moore, Oliver Gogarty, Signe Toksvig, Kate O’Brien) in conversation with medical, scientific, and legal writing on sexual health, it charts how the medicalization and politicization of sex informed the emergence and development of modernism in Ireland.

Awards

British Association for Irish Studies Book Prize, 2024 – Highly Commended.

Reviews

‘Houston interweaves disciplines in a way that reflects some of the very best work being produced in the medical humanities. The result is a highly nuanced portrait, attesting to an ambivalence, and at times a hypocrisy, on the part of authors in combatting official attempts to dictate Irish identity along rather puritanical and racially pure lines … Well-written and well-researched, Houston’s argumentation is built upon sophisticated readings of literature and knowledgeable engagement with medical texts and political discourse.’

– Modernism / Modernity

‘Lloyd (Meadhbh) Houston’s excellent Irish Modernism and the Politics of Sexual Health is an important contribution to scholarship on modernism, the Irish literary revival, and twentieth-century Irish politics and culture … and will enrich readers in Irish studies, medical humanities, and literary and cultural studies … [A]n interdisciplinary, richly researched, and urgent way of thinking about sexual health in the twentieth century, in the contexts of both specifically Irish and broadly European biopolitics.’

– Journal of British Studies

‘This is a rigorous, accessible and mischievously subversive study of the rhetoric of sexual health in Ireland that will enlighten and entertain its readers.’

– Irish Literary Supplement

‘With Irish Modernism and the Politics of Sexual Health, Lloyd Meadhbh Houston can be said to have done medical historians and scholars of Irish literature a profound service.’

– Reading Ireland

‘[T]imely in its publication, unique in its scope, exhaustive in its subject-matter, and useful for scholars across a variety of disciplines … indispensable for scholars of Irish literature and history.’ 

– The Parish Review: Journal of Flann O’Brien Studies

Peer-Reviewed Articles

– ‘Parnellites, Playboys, and Pathology: Irish Modernist Drama and the Politics of Sexual Health,’ Journal of Medical Humanities, 44.1 (March 2023), 43-59.

–‘Beckett in the Dock: Censorship, Biopolitics, and the Sinclair Trial,’ Estudios Irlandeses – Journal of Irish Studies ‘Samuel Beckett and Biopolitics’ Special Issue, 14.2 (November 2019), 21-37.

– ‘“Sterilization of the mind and apotheosis of the litter”: Beckett, Censorship, and Fertility,’ Review of English Studies, 69.290 (June 2018), 546-64.

– ‘A Portrait of the Chief as a General Paralytic: Rhetorics of Sexual Pathology in the Parnell Split,’ Irish Studies Review, 25.4 (2017), 472-92.

– ‘(Il)legal Deposits: Ulysses and the Copyright Libraries,’ The Library, 18.2 (June 2017), 131-51.

– ‘Towards a History of the Phi Collection,’ Bodleian Library Record, 28.2 (October 2015), 179-94.

Book Chapters

– ‘London’ in Sean O’Casey in Context, ed. James Moran (Cambridge University Press, 2025).

– ‘Dear Dr Kirkpatrick: Recovering Irish Experiences of VD, 1924-47’ in Anne R. Hanley and Jessica Meyer, eds. Patient Voices in Britain, 1840-1948: Historical and Policy Perspectives (Manchester University Press, 2021), 255-298.

– ‘Survival of the Unfittest: Synge, Yeats, and the Rhetoric of Health’ in Paul Fagan, John Greaney, and Tamara Radak, eds. Irish Modernisms: Gaps, Conjectures, Possibilities (Bloomsbury, 2021), 115-28.

– ‘“Veni, V.D., Vici”: Flann O’Brien, Sexual Health, and the Literature of Exhaustion’ in Ruben Borg and Paul Fagan, eds. Flann O’Brien: Gallows Humour (Cork: Cork University Press, 2020), 146-62.

Reviews and Reports

– ‘The Poets of Rapallo: How Mussolini’s Italy Shaped US, British, and Irish Writers (Review),’ Estudios Irlandeses, 18 (March 2023), 255-60.

– ‘Quare and Queer: 100 Queer Poems, Queering the Green, The Sun Isn’t Out Long Enough,’ Times Literary Supplement (27 January 2023), 19.

– ‘Science, Technology, and Irish Modernism (Review),’ International Yeats Studies, 5.1 (April 2021), 71-78.

– ‘Ulysses in West Britain: Joyce’s Dublin and Dubliners’ (Review),’ Irish Studies Review (Published Online, 02 February 2021).

– ‘Joyce’s Non-Fiction Writings: “Outside his Jurisfiction” (Review),’ James Joyce Quarterly, 56.3-4 (Spring-Summer 2019), 448-51.

– ‘Non-Binary: Memoirs of Gender and Identity (Review),’ Times Literary Supplement (28 June 2019), 30.

– ‘Silence in Modern Irish Literature (Review),’ International Yeats Studies, 2.2 (May 2018), 69-73.

– ‘Irish Modernism(s): Gaps, Conjectures, Possibilities,’ The Parish Review, 4.1 (Spring 2018), 69-74.

– ‘Joyce in Court: James Joyce and the Law (Review),’ James Joyce Broadsheet, 108 (October 2017), 2.

– ‘The Private Case: A Supplement (Review),’ Times Literary Supplement (15 September 2017), 30.