Professor Tim Woods
Professor in English and American Studies
BA (Bristol) MA PhD (Southampton)
Contact
Email: tww@aber.ac.uk
Office: D52
Phone: +44 (0)1970 622532
Responsibilities
Dean of Faculty of ArtsTeaching Areas
Twentieth-Century writing; African literatures in English; Contemporary British and American poetry; modernist and postmodernist writing; and literary theory, especially Marxism and poststructuralism.Research
Tim's main teaching and research interests are Twentieth-Century writing; African literatures in English; Contemporary British and American poetry; modernist and postmodernist writing; and literary theory, especially Marxism and poststructuralism. He has a particular interest in the relationship of ethics to literature, as well as representations of history and memory in twentieth-century literature. He has supervised research degrees in a range of subjects including Ngugi wa Thiong’o and African fiction, contemporary British Poetry, contemporary American Poetry, Religion and the Metaphysics of Postmodernism, contemporary American Fiction, Emmanuel Levinas, Postmodernism and Nihilism, and Cyberpunk Fiction, and would welcome doctoral applications in any of these areas. He is currently writing a book on post-apartheid South African Literature, and researching American poetry in 1950s and 1960s New England.Additional Interests
Conferences
Tim has been the organiser of several conferences at Aberystwyth University, including the the British Association of American Studies 2003 Conference at Aberystwyth. He served as Chair of the Conference Sub-Committee on the BAAS Executive Committee until 2006. He is a member of the Higher Education Academy and he served as a member of Panel 47 (American and Area Studies) for the RAE 2007. He is also on the Peer Review panel for the AHRC. After a term as Head of the Department of English (2002-2007), he is currently Dean of the Faculty of Arts.
Staff Publications
Books
T. Woods and H.Grice, eds, "I'm telling you stories": Jeanette Winterson and the Politics of Reading (Amsterdam and Atlanta, Georgia: Editions Rodopi, 1998), 136pp.
T. Woods and D.Rainsford, eds, Critical Ethics: Text, Theory and Responsibility (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), 284pp.
T. Woods, A.Hadfield, and D.Rainsford, eds, The Ethics in Literature (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), 281pp.
T.Woods, Beginning Postmodernism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 275pp. (Reprinted 2002). Second expanded edition prepared for publication in 2009.
T.Woods and P.Middleton, Literatures of Memory: Time, Space and History in Postwar Writing (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 323pp.
T.Woods, Who’s Who of Twentieth-Century Novelists (London: Routledge, 2001), 380pp.
T.Woods, The Poetics of the Limit: Ethics and Politics in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry (Palgrave-Macmillan: New York, 2002), xvi + 287pp.
T. Woods, African Pasts: History and Memory in African Literature (Manchester: MUP, 2007), xii + 291pp.
Journals
"'Liquid Letters': Alan Halsey's 'Five Years Out'", Fragmente, 3 (Spring 1991), pp.64-69.
"Louis Zukofsky and Theodor Adorno: The 'Negative Dialectics' of Zukofsky's 'A'", Parataxis, 3 (Spring 1993), pp.40-66.
"Alan Halsey: Shadow Recension", Pages: Resources for the Linguistically Innovative Poetries (March 1996), pp.418-419.
"Allen Fisher's Place Project and the 'Spatial Turn'", Parataxis, 8 (Summer, 1996), pp.39-46.
"'Thought, itself, ruptured': The Spiritual Materialist Poetics of David Miller", The Poet's Voice, 4:2, New Series (Salzburg, Spring 1998), pp.95-113.
"Mending the Skin of Memory: Ethics and History in Contemporary Narratives", Rethinking History, 2:3 (December, 1998), pp.339-348.
"Memory and Ethics in Contemporary Poetry", English, 49 (Summer 2000), pp.155-165.
Peter Middleton and Tim Woods, "Textual Memory: The Making of the Titanic's Literary Archive", Textual Practice, 15:3 (Winter 2001), pp.507-526.
"Giving and Receiving: Nuruddin Farah's Gifts, or, the Postcolonial Logic of Third World Aid", The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 38.1 (Spring 2003), pp.91-112.
"Zukofsky at Columbia", Jacket, 30 (July 2006), http://jacketmagazine.com/30/z-woods.html
"George Oppen and the Public Sphere", Journal of American Studies, 45.3, (2011)
With Helena Grice, "Human Rights, Human Wrongs: Literatures of Captivity", Textual Practice, forthcoming 2012
Book Chapters
Paul Auster's The Music of Chance: Aleatorical (Dis)harmonies Within 'The City of the World'" in Dennis Barone ed, Beyond the Red Notebook: Essays on Paul Auster (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), pp.143-161.
"'Looking for signs in the sky': Urban Space and the Postmodern in Paul Auster's In The Country of Last Things", in Dennis Barone, ed, Beyond the Red Notebook: Essays on Paul Auster (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), pp.107-128.
"The Ethical Subject: The Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas" in Karl Simms, ed, Ethics and the Subject (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1997) pp.53-60.
H.Grice and T.Woods, "Reading Jeanette Winterson Writing", in H.Grice and T.Woods, eds, 'I'm telling you stories': Jeanette Winterson and the Politics of Reading (Amsterdam and Atlanta, Georgia: Rodopi, 1998), pp.1-11.
H.Grice and T.Woods, "Grand (Dis)Unified Theories? Dislocated Discourses in Gut Symmetries", in H.Grice and T.Woods, eds, 'I'm telling you stories': Jeanette Winterson and the Politics of Reading (Amsterdam and Atlanta, Georgia: Rodopi, 1998), pp.117-126.
"Spectres of History: Ethics and Postmodern Fictions of Temporality", in D.Rainsford and T.Woods, eds, Critical Ethics: Text, Theory and Responsibility (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), pp.105-121.
D.Rainsford and T.Woods, "Ethics and Textuality", in D.Rainsford and T.Woods, eds, Critical Ethics: Text, Theory and Responsibility (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), pp.1-19.
A.Hadfield, D.Rainsford, and T.Woods, "Literature and the Return to Ethics", in A.Hadfield, D.Rainsford, and T.Woods, eds, The Ethics in Literature (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), pp.1-14.
"Treacherous Assault to Prolonged Siege: Directions in Contemporary British Poetry Since 1975", in Wolfgang Görtschacher et. al. eds, Poetry Now: Contemporary British and Irish Poetry in the Making (Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag, 1999), pp.19-30.
"Literature and History", in Peter Lambert and Phillipp Schofield, eds, Historians and the Practices of History (London: Routledge, 2003), pp.162-173.
"Re-Enchanting the City: Sites and Non-Sites in Urban Fiction", in E. Tabuteau and Ph. Laplace, eds. Cities on the Margin/On the Margin of Cities (Presses Universitaires de Franche-Comté, France: 2003), pp.63-80.
"Art tracking music": Louis Zukofsky's Po/Ethics of Music', in C. Pagnoulle and M. Delville, eds. Poetry and Music (Liège, Belgium: 2003), pp.121-138.
"African Writing and Modernity" in P.Brooker and A.Thacker, eds. Geographies of Modernism: Literatures, Cultures, Spaces (London, Routledge: 2005), pp.126-135.
"Reading Urban Spaces in African Texts", in C. Lindner, ed. Cityscapes: Perspectives from Modern and Contemporary Culture (London, Routledge: 2006), pp.101-111.
"'Preferring the wrong way': Mapping the Ethical Diversity of US Twentieth-Century Poetry", in C.Bigsby, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Modern American Culture (1900-now) (Cambridge: CUP, 2006), pp.450-468.
"A Complex Legacy: Modernity's Uneasy Discourse of Ethics and Responsibility", in David James, ed, The Legacies of Modernism: Historicising Postwar and Contemporary Fiction (Cambridge UP, 2011), pp. 153-169
"Black Mountain and Associates", in Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, eds, The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines. Vol 2 (Oxford UP, forthcoming)
"Academic Magazines", in Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, eds, The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines. Vol 2 (Oxford UP, forthcoming)
"Stupid Bullies and Clapping Clowns: Resistance to Power in Nuruddin Farah's Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship Trilogy" in Yianna Liatsos, ed. Memories of Home: Generations and Genealogies in African Literature (Trenton, N J: Africa World Press, forthcoming.
Reviews
Tim has reviewed for Speech and Drama, Parataxis, Planet: The Welsh Internationalist, The Journal of American Studies, Poetry Wales, American Literature, The British Journal of Aesthetics, The Review of English Studies, Critique, Journal of American Studies, Textual Practice, and English.
He was the Series Co-General Editor with Helena Grice, of Representing American Events (with Edinburgh University Press) between 2004 and 2009