Ronan McDonald holds the Gerry Higgins Chair of Irish Studies at the University of Melbourne. He has published widely in the field of modern Irish literature and also in the history of criticism and the value of the humanities. Books on the latter include The Death of the Critic (2008) and the edited collection The Values of Literary Studies (2015). He was Director of Beckett International Foundation from 2004-10 and the author of Cambridge Introduction to Samuel Beckett (2007).