Staff Research Interests
Natasha Alden, BA MSt DPhil (Lecturer)
Main research interest is British second generation fiction about the Two World Wars, or ‘postmemory fiction’. Her doctoral work examines how the desire to bear witness to their parents’ experiences, and to explore the enduring effects of the wars, compels some authors to write about the conflicts. Lacking experiences of their own, they turn to the historical record; her recent research has focussed on how authors use historical source material. Her teaching interests lie in twentieth century and contemporary literature, particularly contemporary historical fiction, women’s writing, visual culture and gay and lesbian fiction.
Jayne Archer, BA, MA, MPhil, PhD (Lecturer)
Main teaching interests in Medieval and Renaissance literature and literary theory.
Main research interests are Elizabethan court culture and entertainments; science, alchemy, and astrology in early modern England; the early modern Inns of Court; and early modern women writers, particularly their writings on housewifery
Tiffany Atkinson BA MA PhD (Lecturer)
Main teaching and research interests in critical theory, twentieth-century literature and poetics. Currently working on publications which examine constructions of 'the body' through the discourses of anatomy, philosophy, psychoanalysis, racial difference, pleasure and pain. Also teaches creative writing and writes poetry.
Peter Barry MA (Professor) welcomes PhD proposals in the following areas:
Modern Poetry in English (C20th/C21st); Contemporary Poetry in English (1970s onwards), especially poetry of the avant-garde, urban poetries, and poetries in new media; literary theory and its uses, especially narratology and its applications in the analysis of culture; the teaching of literary theory; the short story
Matthew Francis BA MA PhD (Reader) welcomes PhD proposals in the following areas:
Creative Writing (poetry or prose fiction) particularly from applicants with a well-developed interest in twentieth-century and contemporary literature.
Helena Grice BA MA PhD (Senior Lecturer)
Helena Grice welcomes PhD proposals in the following areas: ethnic American literature, ethnicity theory, feminist fiction and theory, Asian British writing
Her teaching and research interests lie in American Literature, especially Asian American Women’s Writing, African American literature, Women’s Autobiography and feminist theory, and Twentieth Century American Literature. She is the author of Negotiating Identities (MUP, 2002), and Maxine Hong Kingston (MUP, 2005), and co-author, with Martin Padget, Maria Lauret and Candida Hepworth, of Beginning Ethnic American Literatures (MUP, 2001), Asian American Fiction, History and Life Writing: International Encounters (Routledge 2009) and co-editor with Tim Woods of “I’m Telling You Stories”: Jeanette Winterson and the Politics of Reading (Rodopi, 1998)
Kelly Grovier BA MPhil MLitt DPhil (Lecturer) welcomes PhD proposals in the following areas: Creative Writing and British Romanticism
Sarah Hutton BA PhD (Professor)
Lectures on Renaissance and Seventeenth century. Main research interests in Early Modern Literature and Intellectual History, including Platonism, the Cambridge Platonists, Women and Science and Philosophy. Her interests also include biography and textual editing. Her publications include, Anne Conway (2004), Newton and Newtonianism (edited with James E. Force, 2004), Women, Science and Medicine (edited with Lynette Hunter, 1996), Platonism and the English Imagination (edited with Anna Baldwin, 1994), as well as articles on Margaret Cavendish, Emilie Du Châtelet , and Catharine Macaulay. She co-ordinates the AHRC research network on Anglo-French Intellectual and Cultural interchange. She is Director of the series International Archives in the History of Ideas.
Richard Marggraf-Turley BA PhD (Professor) welcomes PhD proposals in the following areas:
Romantic literary and political culture; Romanticism and masculinity; Romanticism and language; women Romantic writers; John Keats; Leigh Hunt; Alfred Tennyson; Bob Dylan
Louise Marshall, BA, MA, PGCE, PhD (Lecturer)
Main research interest lies in early eighteenth century drama, particularly history plays as vehicles for political comment and propaganda and as participants in broad debates regarding developing notions of British identity. Other interests include, Restoration women writers, staging political women and early modern midwifery manuals
Martin Padget BA, PhD (Senior Lecturer)
Teaches American literature and American Studies. His research concentrates on the American West/Southwest, Native American literature, the literature and iconography of travel, and photography. His book 'Indian Country': Representations of Travel in the American Southwest will be published by University of New Mexico Press in 2004. A second monograph on photography of the Western Isles of Scotland, for which he has been awarded AHRB funding, is scheduled for publication in 2005. He is also co-author of Beginning Ethnic American Literatures (Manchester University Press, 2001).
Jem Poster MA PhD (Professor and Director of Creative Writing) welcomes PhD proposals in the following areas:
Creative Writing (poetry or prose fiction) particularly from applicants with a well-developed interest in twentieth-century and contemporary literature. Author of a collection of poetry, Brought to Light (Bloodaxe, 2001) and two novels, Courting Shadows (Sceptre, 2002) and Rifling Paradise (Sceptre 2006). Other publications include George Crabbe: Selected Poetry (Carcanet, 1986) and The Thirties Poets (Open University Press, 1993). He has won first prize in both the Cardiff International Poetry Competition and the Peterloo Poets Open Poetry Competition, as well as one of the Arts Council’s annual Writers’ Awards in respect of Rifling Paradise. He has reviewed regularly for The Guardian and The Australian.
Sarah H Prescott BA PhD (Reader) welcomes PhD proposals in the following areas:
Eighteenth-century poetry and fiction; women's writing (1660-1800); Welsh writing in English (1700-1800); women writers in Wales (1660-1800); representations of Wales in eighteenth-century writing
Lyn Pykett BA PhD (Emeritus Professor)
Nineteenth-century fiction, especially Dickens, Collins, women's writing, sensation fiction and turn-of-the century fiction; nineteenth-century culture more generally, especially the periodical press; early twentieth-century fiction; contemporary fiction.
Elisabeth Salter BA PhD (Lecturer)
Main research interests are in cultural creativity and textual practice in medieval and early modern Britain with a particular focus on the performance of reading and writing, for entertainment, devotion, practical necessity, and commemoration. Also receptions of the past—‘medievalism’, ‘tudorism’, ‘renaissancism’ etc.
Michael J Smith MA (Director of Undergraduate Programmes)
Chief teaching and research interests are sixteenth- and seventeenth-Century literature, especially Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, (particularly the later moral plays, the history plays and company repertoires). Teaching interests also include Derek Walcott and literary theory.
Luke Thurston BA MA PhD (Lecturer)
Main research interests are Modernist literature (especially Joyce, Yeats, Beckett and Pessoa), psychoanalysis, postcolonial theory and contemporary French philosophy.Welcomes PhD proposals on any aspect of Modernist or contemporary literature, psychoanalytic theory, the theory and practice of translation, or literature and ethical questions.
Damian Walford Davies MA MPhil DPhil (Professor and Head of Department) welcomes PhD proposals in the following areas:
Romanticism (especially the links between literary and political culture); the literature of the Victorian period; Welsh Writing in English; twentieth-century poetry.
Any aspect of C20th British Fiction and Poetry; Any aspect of C20th American Fiction and Poetry; Contemporary Poetics; Postmodernism; Modernism; Literary Theory (especially Marxism and Frankfurt School , Poststructuralism, Deconstruction, Emmanuel Levinas, Postcolonialism, Narratology); African Literatures in English; South African Literature; C20th American Culture; Trauma Theory and Literature