Our Research Interests

Natasha Alden lectures in twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature. Her monograph, Reading Behind the Lines: Postmemory, History, Story (MUP, 2014) explored the uses of the past in a selection of recent historical novels , focussing on postmemory as a lens through which to understand innovation in historical fiction representing the World Wars. She has also written on Sarah Waters, Pat Barker, David Jones, Adam Thorpe, Ian McEwan and Emma Donoghue. Her research interests include memory, the historical novel, contemporary realism and queer writing.

Teaches twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature, and critical theory. His main research interests are in: modern and contemporary writing from Britain and Ireland; literary geographies; late modernism; theories and representations of everyday life. He is the author of Ciaran Carson: Space, Place, Writing (Liverpool UP,2010) and co-editor of Poetry & Geography: Space and Place in Post-war Poetry (Liverpool UP, 2013) and of Regional Modernisms (Edinburgh UP, 2013). He is an editor of the peer-reviewed journals Literary Geographies and The International Journal of Welsh Writing in English. He is currently writing a book on late modernist poetry and the poetics of place.

Lectures in Romantic and Victorian literature. Her research interests include Victorian poetry, women’s writing, literature and evolution, humorous literature, and periodical culture. Her doctoral thesis examined feminist responses to Darwinian evolution in late-Victorian women’s poetry. Publications include an article in Women: A Cultural Review on representations of sexual selection in the work of the Victorian poet Mathilde Blind. Her current project is a study of women contributors to ’Punch’ magazine between 1859 and 1919.

Teaches Creative Writing.  Author of two novels, WHOM(Bloomsbury, 1989) and The Book of the Needle (Cinnamon, 2014), a collection of short stories, Singing a Man to Death (Cinnamon, 2012), and five collections of poetry: Blizzard (Faber, 1996), Dragons (Faber, 2001), Whereabouts (rufus books, 2005), Mandeville (Faber, 2008) and Muscovy (Faber, 2013). He also has a research interest in the Scottish poet W S Graham; he is the editor of Graham’s New Collected Poems (Faber, 2004) and author of a monograph, Where the People Are: Language and Community in the Poetry of W S Graham (Salt Publishing, 2004). He is currently working on a book of poems inspired by the classic Welsh tales of The Mabinogion.

Teaches twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature, and creative writing. Author of the poetry pamphlet Estate Fragments (Knives, Forks, and Spoons, 2014), and co-editor, with Liam Murray Bell, of a book of essays, Writing Urban Space (Zero, 2012). He has also published creative non-fiction. He has research interests in working-class writing (and representations of class and inequality more generally), nature writing, docu-poetry, the Objectivists, Buddhist poetics, and theories of creativity.

Main teaching and research interests in Romantic political and literary culture. Has published widely on Keats, Barry Cornwall, Tennyson and Shakespeare. He is author of Writing Essays, 2nd ed (2016), and four monographs: The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature (2002), Keats’s Boyish Imagination (2004), Bright Stars: John Keats, Barry Cornwall and Romantic Literary Culture (2009), and Food and the Literary Imagination, co-authored with Jayne Archer and Howard Thomas (2014). He is  co-editor with Damian Walford Davies of The Monstrous Debt: Modalities of Romantic Influence in Twentieth-Century Literature (2005), and editor of a book on creative writing pedagogy, The Writer in the Academy: Creative Interfrictions (D. S. Brewer, 2012). His creative writing publications include a crime fiction novel set in the Romantic period, The Cunning House (2015), and three volumes of poetry: Whiteout, co-authored with Damian Walford Davies (2006), The Fossil-Box (2008), and Wan-Hu’s Flying Chair (2009), which won the Wales Book of the Year “People’s Choice” award in 2010. In 2007, he won the Keats-Shelley Prize for Poetry. He is a regular guest on BBC radio, and his work has featured in the Guardian, Telegraph, Independent, Sunday Times, Daily Mail and Times Literary Supplement. Since 2012, he has been Aberystwyth University’s Professor of Engagement with the Public Imagination.

Teaches eighteenth-century literature and literary theory. Her main research interests are in early eighteenth-century drama, representations of Britishness, women’s writing, and literary adaptation. She is the author of National Myth and Imperial Fantasy: Representations of British Identity on the Early Eighteenth-Century Stage (Palgrave, 2008), which examines a group of history plays that contribute to eighteenth-century debates regarding Britishness, colonial identity, and Britain’s place in a world of commercial and imperial possibilities. She is currently working on a project examining the authorised and illegitimate spaces allocated to women in eighteenth-century writing.

Ann Matthews Teaches Creative Writing across poetry and prose. Her research interests encompass modernist and poststructural approaches to the short story and innovative landscape and city poetry with a special interest in identity and place. She is interested in the methodology and philosophy of collecting materials to write from and also the interpretation of ‘everyday living’ within fiction. This includes an interest in Dirty Realism and the use of non-standard English. She has recently completed her third poetry collection Home Turf (out in 2018). Her poetry collections Strangeways (2014) and Losing Boundaries (2016) were published by Knives Forks and Spoons Press. Poems from the latter were displayed as part of the Blackpool Illuminations in 2015. Her poems have been published in Tears in the Fence, Shearsman Magazine, Shadow Train, Litmus, Poem Art Threat and A Glimpse of/ a hybrid form of narrative e-magazine. Her short stories have been published in Beatification Magazine, London Journal of Fiction, Indigo Journal and StepAway Magazine. She is currently completing a collection of interlinking short stories and working on an innovative autobiography Fringes about life and music in Wales in the 1990s.

Lectures on creative writing and contemporary literature. His main research interests are science fiction, comic books/graphic novels, contemporary television narratives, twentieth/twenty-first century Irish fiction, and creative writing theory and practice. His work regularly interrogates issues of genre and form, and he has published articles on Flann O’Brien and science fiction, on the banning of John McGahern’s novel The Dark, on the metafictional structure of Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers of Victory, as well as book chapters on television shows including Lost, Battlestar Galactica, and Fringe. His short stories have appeared in publications such as Interzone, the Irish Times, the ‘futures’ page of Nature, Electric Velocipede, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction.

Teaches nineteenth-century literature. Main research interests are Victorian literature and culture, children’s literature, the New Woman writing and the fin de siècle, Victorian periodicals, and the history of adolescence and education. She is currently writing a book based on her doctoral thesis, which examined adolescent girlhood and literary culture in the late nineteenth century. She has published articles on Victorian girls’ magazines, girls’ school stories, and the Irish children’s writer, L. T. Meade.

Main teaching and research interests are in Victorian and modernist literature, Welsh literature in English and psychoanalysis. He is author of Literary Ghosts from the Victorians to Modernism: the Haunting Interval (Routledge, 2012) and James Joyce and the Problem of Psychoanalysis (Cambridge University Press 2004), editor of Re-inventing the Symptom: Essays on the Final Lacan (Other Press 2002) and translator of psychoanalytic texts by André Green, Jean Laplanche and Roberto Harari. He contributed to the Blackwell Companion to Joyce (2008) and James Joyce in Context (Cambridge University Press 2009) and recently published articles in Textual Practice, the Journal of Modern Literature, and Qui Parle. He is currently working on a new study, War and the Modernist Eye: May Sinclair, Wyndham Lewis and David Jones. He is the Co-Director of the David Jones Centre and welcomes research proposals on Welsh literature in English, modernism, the ghost story, or literature and psychoanalysis. 

My primary research focus is late medieval secular literature, especially the works by Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower. My monograph Fragments: Past and Present in Chaucer and Gower(Peter Lang, 2009) focusses mainly on their use and appropriation of their cultural past(s), which also informs a section in my edited collection on the works of John Gower (Brepols, 2009). More recently, I have developed two further research interests that complement this main strand: medievalism and digital humanities. The former concentrates on Chaucer’s cultural afterlives, especially in cyberspace and on screen [in Chaucer’s Poetry: Words, authority and ethics (Four Courts, 2012), while the latter explores the potentials of electronic editing and text mining for our engagement with late medieval texts, using Gower’s Confessio amantis as its central object. My teaching cuts across these three areas, concentrating on English literature of the late medieval period while looking beyond this into the Early Modern period as well as digital approaches to manuscript studies and the wider area of medievalism, especially historical novels and modern adaptations of medieval texts.  

Main teaching and research interests are twentieth-century writing; contemporary British and American poetry; modernism and postmodernism; literary theory, especially Marxism and poststructuralism; and African literatures in English. His main publications are Beginning Postmodernism (1999; 2nd ed, 2009), Who's Who of Twentieth-Century Novelists (2000), The Poetics of the Limit (2002), co-author of Literatures of Memory (2001), and his most recent monograph is entitled African Pasts: History and Memory in African Literature (2007). He is co-editor of 'I'm telling you Stories': Jeanette Winterson and the Politics of Reading (1998), Critical Ethics (1999) and The Ethics of Literature (1999). He is currently writing a book on literature in South Africa entitled Post-Apartheid Narratives: South African Literatures in Transition (due in 2014). In addition to recent book chapters on Nuruddin Farah, American small press magazines, and African modernism, articles have appeared in the Journal of American Studies (on George Oppen) and Textual Practice (Literature and Human Rights) and Paideuma (on Cid Corman). He was a member of the 2007 REF panel for Area Studies, a previous member of the Executive Committee of the British Association for American Studies (BAAS), and is currently an AHRC Peer Review Panel member and joint editor with Peter Middleton of Torque Press poetry publications.

Jacqueline Yallop is the author of three novels: Kissing Alice(Atlantic Books, 2010) - shortlisted for the McKitterick Prize - Obedience (Atlantic Books, 2011) and Marlford (Atlantic Books, 2014). She also writes creative non-fiction, and has published Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves: How the Victorians  Collected the World (Atlantic, 2011) - shortlisted for the Longman-History Today Book of  the Year 2012 - and Dreamstreets (Cape, 2015), looking at nineteenth century workers' villages and their contexts. Her research interests include nineteenth-century history and interdisciplinary approaches to texts, art objects and display. She curates exhibitions, and is currently working on a triennial of major shows exploring the legacy of John Ruskin’s thought on contemporary art and society. She is a Director of the Guild of St. George, an organisation which was established by Ruskin in 1871 and which continues to promote active, practical and inclusive projects in education, environment and culture.