Modern and Contemporary Literature
English Literature research theme
Our research covers the full sweep of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from modernism to contemporary media and culture.
We analyse literature and reading cultures across the world including English and Irish fantasy fiction, African American literary and visual culture, Black British and British Asian fiction, and authors in West and East Africa.
We believe in literature's importance for global infrastructures and human rights, exploring the effects and ethics of refugee narratives, postcolonial literature, life writing, queer poetics and environmental activism.
Our interdisciplinary approach shows how literature shapes and reflects fields such as law, evolutionary biology and the history of science. We investigate emerging forms and genres from early twentieth century magazines to contemporary popular fiction, and trace the impact of technologies like mass production, social media and artificial intelligence.
Researchers
- Dr Amy Burge - Popular fiction and romance
- Dr Dorothy Butchard - contemporary literature, popular fiction and digital media
- Dr Rona Cran - Twentieth century American literature
- Dr John Fagg - American art and literature
- Dr Rex Ferguson - Historical specificity of texts
- Dr Rosie Graham - Contemporary digital culture
- Dr Dave Gunning - Contemporary Anglophone literature and postcolonial studies
- Professor Alexandra Harris - British art and literature, especially in relation to landscape
- Dr Matt Hayler - Contemporary literature and digital cultures
- Dr Andrew Hodgson - English poetry and individualism
- Professor John Holmes - Scientific ideas and cultural forms in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including poetry, architecture and the visual arts
- Professor David James - twentieth- and twenty-first-century writing, with a particular focus on the history and theory of the novel
- Professor Deborah Longworth - Nineteenth and twentieth century women writers
- Dr Daniel Moore - Nineteenth and twentieth century literature and visual culture
- Dr Chris Mourant - modernism and empire, twentieth century media history and textual scholarship
- Professor Peter Morey - 20th century, contemporary and postcolonial literary studies
- Dr Jimmy Packham - American Gothic literature and maritime writing
- Dr Rebecca Roach - Literature, media and book history
- Dr Asha Rogers - Modern and contemporary writing in English from across the postcolonial world
- Dr Philippa Semper - Modern fantasy literature
- Professor Max Saunders - Modern literature and culture
- Professor Lyndsey Stonebridge - Twentieth-century and contemporary literature, political theory, and history
- Dr Rachel Sykes - The twenty-first century American novel
- Dr Nathan Waddell - Early twentieth-century and Modernist literature
- Dr Sara K Wood - American literature and culture
Honorary and Emeritus
- Professor Andrzej Gasiorek - Twentieth century British literature and Modernism