The Centre for Contemporary Literature and Culture provides a home for staff and students working on late twentieth to early twenty-first-century literature, film, TV, theory, and popular culture. We regularly host visiting speakers, public lectures, conferences, and symposia, as well as reading groups, workshops, and other public events.
Founded in 2015, the Centre for Contemporary Literature and Culture provides a home for staff and students working on mid-twentieth to early twenty-first-century literature, film, TV, theory, and popular culture. Based at the University of Birmingham, CCLC regularly hosts visiting speakers, public lectures, conferences, and symposia, as well as reading groups, workshops, and other public events.
Our academics and students work on everything from the state sponsorship of British literature, postcolonial theory and fiction, sound in contemporary American fiction, popular romance fiction, the depiction of women in contemporary TV, Islamophobia and anti-Muslim prejudice in the novel, and recent gender, queer, and disability theories. We welcome all inquiries and applications for postgraduate study and our events are open to all, regardless of academic record or experience.
Please contact the centre directors Amy Burge and Rachel Sykes with inquiries or to be added to our mailing list.
People and Pages, our biennial poetry night
The CCLC Annual lecture, previously given by Sara Ahmed, Testament, and Nikesh Shukla
Black History Month workshop: Unveiling Hidden Stories at the Barber Institute of Fine Art
CCLC is proud to represent the vibrant and diverse research conducted on contemporary literatures and cultures across EDACS and the wider Birmingham area. Our aim is to develop connections with local artists and venues, taking our events beyond the university campus to showcase and share new projects and intellectual work while also developing skills and meeting the training needs of both our members and the wider community.
Our understanding of ‘literature’ and ‘culture’ is expansive and inclusive and our central aims are to develop critical methods that facilitate productive encounters with contemporary literature, culture, and the city around us. We, therefore, welcome inquiries about collaboration on future projects and events, particularly from other institutions, local writers, artists, and activists, as well as non-academic organisations.
The Centre for Contemporary Literature and Culture brings together scholars with an interest in how the literary and related arts are produced and experienced in the late twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries.
You can find a list of our current research projects and creative and critical publications below.
Contemporary Studies Network (CSN) provides a platform for discussion of emerging research and supports networking amongst scholars with an interest in contemporary literature, culture, politics, and critical theory. Organised by Dr Rachel Sykes (Birmingham), Dr Diletta De Cristofaro (Northumbria), and Dr Arin Keeble (Edinburgh Napier), CSN hold regular public engagement events.
Scholarship on the contemporary has a unique relationship to questions of canonicity and value. What values shape the choices made in research and teaching on the contemporary? What canons does this work produce? And how do these values and canons relate to those produced in education and the publishing and cultural industries? This series of workshops, held across 2019 – 2021, was organised by Contemporary Studies Network in collaboration with Kevin Brazil (University of Southampton) and Andrew Dean (UCL), and funded by the British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies (BACLS), the Leverhulme Trust, and the University of Southampton.
Focusing on writing by women deemed ‘popular’ rather than ‘literary’, this network engages with under-studied popular and genre texts (including romance, chick-lit, comics, graphic novels, detective fiction, Young Adult, fantasy, autobiography, memoir, and science fiction) from a range of established critical disciplinary perspectives and across languages. Led by Dr Amy Burge.
Professor Lyndsey Stonebridge co-leads this interdisciplinary and participatory research project supported by a Large PaCCS Grant (£800,000) awarded by the AHRC-ESRC through the Global Challenges Research Fund. This project aims to reframe debates about the roles and experiences of local communities and refugees in contexts of conflict-induced displacement in the global South, with a particular focus on displacement from Syria to neighbouring countries in the Middle East.
Professor David James is currently working on a sequence of books revolving around the politics and poetics of affective forms in contemporary world Anglophone writing. You can watch his inaugural lecture on the topic here.
This project reflects on how literature, culture, and new media can interrogate the effects of sharing and surveillance. We aim to provide a space to discuss intersectional ideas about the formation of identity and the digital, contemplating sharing and/or surveillance across a range of literatures, media platforms, and art forms. Led by Dr Rachel Sykes and Dr Dorothy Butchard.
An interdisciplinary group of students and researchers working within the sphere of popular culture. We aim to build an inclusive community throughout the Midlands whose areas of interest pertain, however broadly, to the study of popular culture, whether mainstream or alternative. Our Network hosts a variety of monthly events, ranging from seminar-style workshops to our Annual Forum.
Staff associated with CCLC deliver a range of postgraduate teaching and supervision in English and global literature, critical theory, and related cultural studies.
If you are thinking of applying for a PhD or MA by research, please consult our list of staff members and approach potential supervisors before submitting a formal application.
At the postgraduate taught level, our members contribute to the Popular Fiction and Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature Pathway on the MA Literature and Culture.
Associate Professor in Popular Fiction
Department of English Literature
My teaching and research interests are in popular fiction, in particular romance, both medieval and modern. My work is intersectional and focuses on gender, ethnicity and sexuality. I’m currently working on a literary history of romantic masculinity and a project exploring Arab and Muslim women’s genre fiction.
Associate Professor in Contemporary Literature and Culture
Department of English Literature
My research and teaching focus on memoir and contemporary life-writing, digital and popular cultures, and their intersections with gender and queer theory. I am currently working on a study of ‘confession’ under neoliberalism and write regularly on feminist politics in contemporary literature, TV, and pop music.
Assistant Professor of Liberal Arts and Natural Sciences
Liberal Arts and Natural Sciences
Dr Zoe Hope Bulaitis is an educator and researcher who is motivated by better articulating the value of the humanities in the twenty-first century. Drawing on expertise in both nineteenth-century and contemporary studies, Zoe is the author of a recent open access book, Value and the Humanities: The Neoliberal University and Our Victorian Inheritance (Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture, and ...
Lecturer in Contemporary Literature & Digital Cultures
Department of English Literature
I teach and research contemporary and twentieth century literature, with particular interest in digital cultures and creative representations of technological change in the modern age.
Associate Professor in Twentieth-Century American Literature
Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of North America
Department of English Literature
My scholarship is interdisciplinary and centres on the literature and culture of New York City, queer writing, and modern American poetry.
Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing
Department of Film and Creative Writing
I am a poet and critic publishing on contemporary poetry, environmental writing and ecocriticism, with a focus on interdisciplinarity.
Professor in Creative Writing
Department of Film and Creative Writing
I am a bestselling author and journalist who joined the University of Birmingham in September 2014. I have published five novels to date, including most recently The Butchers which won the 2021 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize (awarded to the book that best evokes ‘the spirit of a place’).
Reader in English Literature
Department of English Literature
I teach and research contemporary Anglophone literature and postcolonial studies.
Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Literature and Digital Cultures
Department of English Literature
I’m a senior lecturer in contemporary literature and digital cultures and co-director of the Centre for Digital Cultures in the department of English Literature.
I’m CO-I on the AHRC-funded Ambient Literature project and acted as a UK representative for the COST-funded European EREAD (evolution of reading in the age of digitisation) research network.
My research interests focus ...
Chair in Modern and Contemporary Literature
Department of English Literature
My research and teaching areas span twentieth- and twenty-first-century writing, with a particular focus on the history and theory of the novel. Most recently, I’ve been working on the politics and poetics of affect in contemporary fiction and life-writing, combining my interests in the history of emotions, disability studies, and narrative medicine.
Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Writing
Department of Film and Creative Writing
Anna Metcalfe is a short story writer and novelist. Her story collection, Blind Water Pass, includes the story 'Number Three', shortlisted for the Sunday Times Short Story Award. Her debut novel, Chrysalis, will be published in 2023.
Chair in 20th Century English Literature
Department of English Literature
I work on 20th century, contemporary and postcolonial literary studies, with particular reference to issues of cultural difference, narrative and power. I am the author and/or editor of numerous books, including Fictions of India: Narrative and Power (2000); Rohinton Mistry (2004); Framing Muslims: Stereotyping and Representation after 9/11 (2011), and Islamophobia and the Novel ...
Associate Professor in North American Literature
Department of English Literature
My research focuses on Gothic fiction and on maritime writing, both as separate and overlapping areas of study. I have a long-standing interest in voice and utterance in literary writing, and my work on the Gothic focuses on the haunted and haunting voices that resonate within late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century American Gothic literature. I also work on the deep sea as it is depicted in a ...
Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Literature
Department of English Literature
My teaching and research focuses on 20th and 21st century literature and culture across the Anglophone world, with a particular emphasis on the relationship between literature, media and book history.
Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Postcolonial Literature
Department of English Literature
I am a scholar of twentieth and twenty-first century literature. I research the culture-forming work of institutions as forces in literary history, and how writers have responded to their frequently peculiar demands.
Associate Professor in Victorian Literature
Department of English Literature
My research focusses on the relationship between the British Empire and Victorian Literature, with specialist interests in migration, settler colonialism, memory and textual and material culture. I have further interests in decolonisation, museums, literature and the visual arts. I teach and work on a wide range of nineteenth-century and neo-Victorian literatures, with an emphasis on decolonial ...
Interdisciplinary Chair of Humanities and Human Rights
Department of English Literature
Professor Lyndsey Stonebridge’s work focuses on twentieth-century and contemporary literature, political theory, and history, Human Rights, and Refugee Studies, drawing on the interdisciplinary connections between literature, history, politics, law, and social policy.
Stonebridge’s early work was concerned with the effects of modern violence on the mind in the twentieth and ...
Associate Professor in American Literature and Culture
Department of English Literature
I am a lecturer in American Literature and Culture. My research focuses on twentieth-century African American literature and visual art, with a particular emphasis on the relationship between political and aesthetic ideas of freedom.
Telephone:
+44 (0)121 414 8612
Email:
cclc@contacts.bham.ac.uk
