My research currently focuses on the writings of Samuel Beckett, especially the relevance of Ireland in his work. I am particularly interested in how Beckett's work registers the end of Protestant ascendancy in Ireland in the period after the birth of the Irish Free State. Beckett is often read as a deracinated modernist, an exile, but I argue that his work is profoundly engaged with the fate of southern Irish Protestants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and that the radical interrogation of history and identity in his major works can be linked to the crisis of identification that affected the Protestant minorities in response to the inexorable rise of Catholic Ireland. Many of the chief concerns of his mature writings, including impotence, cultural dislocation, absurdity and quietism, can be linked to his experiences as a member of an indignant minority coming to terms with the birth of the Irish Free State.