Prof Tim Woods

BA Hons (Bristol) MA PhD (Southampton)

Tim has organised 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 and serves as a reviewer for the QAA. After a term as Head of the Department of English (2003-2008), he has served as Dean of the Faculty of the Arts Faculty (2008-2017) and more recently completed a 7-year term as Pro Vice-Chancellor (2017-2024), when he held numerous positions with the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA), the Office of the Independent Adjudicator (OIA), and the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF).

C20th and C21st Writing; American Literature; African Literatures in English; Modern and Contemporary British and American Poetry; Modernist and Postmodernist Writing; Literary Theory, especially Marxism and Poststructuralism.

Tim's main teaching and research interests are C20th and C21st 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, representations of history and memory in twentieth-century literature, and British and American modernist and contemporary poetics. 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 related areas. He is currently researching a book on American poetry in 1950s and 1960s New England, and developing research projects on Anglo-Welsh modernist poetry and African narratives of detention and democracy.