Professor Nathan Waddell BA, MPhil, PhD, PGCHE, FHEA

Photograph of Dr Nathan Waddell

Department of English Literature
Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature

Contact details

Address
Arts Building
University of Birmingham
Edgbaston
Birmingham
B15 2TT
UK

I teach and research twentieth-century literature. My current research priorities are the lives and works of Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957), Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), and George Orwell (1903-1950).

Qualifications

  • BA (University of Birmingham)
  • MPhil (University of Birmingham)
  • PhD (University of Birmingham)
  • PGCHE (University of Nottingham)
  • FHEA (Fellow of the Higher Education Academy)

Biography

I’m a Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature in Birmingham’s Department of English Literature, where I’ve worked since 2017. For 2023-2026, alongside my regular duties at Birmingham, I will be a Visiting Fellow at Northumbria University. You can find more information about me at my personal website, here.

Teaching

Although my teaching now tends to concentrate on twentieth-century literature, I’ve taught across English literary history from the 1300s to the present. I convene a final-year undergraduate specialist module on George Orwell, and give lectures and co-ordinate seminars across the undergraduate and postgraduate curricula.

Postgraduate supervision

My work for the foreseeable future will be concerned with projects on the lives and writings of Wyndham Lewis and George Orwell. As a result, I’m currently best placed to supervise postgraduate research on these figures and their contexts/contemporaries.


Find out more - our PhD English Literature  page has information about doctoral research at the University of Birmingham.

Research

My research tends to focus on questions to do with literature, politics, and culture in the early twentieth-century Anglo-American context. A lot of my attention at the moment is taken up with work on George Orwell. Up-to-date information about my research can be found at my personal website.

Other activities

Much of my professional activity is concerned with the life and work of the controversial polymath Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957), a modernist painter and writer who was also a First World War combatant. Alongside Scott W. Klein, I’m Co-General Editor of The Collected Works of Wyndham Lewis: a 43-volume scholarly edition of Lewis’s fiction and non-fiction published by Oxford University Press. I’m a Trustee of the Wyndham Lewis Estate (the Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust), a registered charity which promotes the study and preservation of Lewis’s output, and between 2010 and 2018 I was a Co-Editor of The Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies.

Publications

Recent publications

Book

Waddell, N 2025, A Bright Cold Day: The Wonder of George Orwell. Oneworld, London.

Waddell, N (ed.) 2025, The Oxford Handbook of George Orwell. Oxford Handbooks, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Waddell, N (ed.) 2021, A Clergyman's Daughter. Oxford World's Classics, Oxford University Press, Oxford. <https://global.oup.com/academic/product/a-clergymans-daughter-9780198848424?cc=gb&lang=en&q=nathan%20waddell>

Waddell, N (ed.) 2020, The Cambridge Companion to Nineteen Eighty-Four. Cambridge University Press.

Waddell, N 2019, Moonlighting: Beethoven and literary modernism. Oxford University Press, Oxford. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198816706.001.0001

Greenberg, J & Waddell, N (eds) 2016, 'Brave New World': Contexts and Legacies. 1 edn, Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-44541-4

Article

Waddell, N 2024, '‘A sinking sensation’: George Orwell and the RMS Titanic', George Orwell Studies.

Waddell, N 2023, ''Elements are VERY GLIB': challenging the convenience of metaphor in the critical reception of BLAST', Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies, vol. 11, no. 1, 6, pp. 67-74. <https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/jwls/vol11/iss1/6>

Waddell, N 2017, 'Modernism and music: a review of recent scholarship', Modernist Cultures, vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 316-330. https://doi.org/10.3366/mod.2017.0173

Chapter

Waddell, N 2023, George Orwell: Politics and Power. in R Potter & M Taunton (eds), The British Novel of Ideas: George Eliot to Zadie Smith. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Waddell, N 2022, Literary Beethovens: Anglo-American writing, 1870-present. in R Durkin, P Dayan, A Englund & K Clausius (eds), The Routledge Companion to Music and Modern Literature. 1st edn, Routledge Music Companions, Routledge, pp. 348-58.

Waddell, N 2020, Oceania’s Dirt: Filth, Nausea, and Disgust in Airstrip One. in N Waddell (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Nineteen Eighty-Four. Cambridge University Press.

Waddell, N 2019, Dystopia. in L Webster (ed.), The Literature Handbook. English and Media Centre, pp. 127-34.

Waddell, N 2019, Ford’s artistic contexts: family and music. in L Colombino, S Haslam & S O'Malley (eds), The Ashgate Research Companion to Ford Madox Ford. Routledge, London, pp. 79-93.

Waddell, N 2017, BLAST (1914-15). in S Ross (ed.), The Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism. Routledge.

View all publications in research portal

Expertise

  • George Orwell
  • Dystopia
  • Wyndham Lewis
  • Modernism
  • Classical music

I'm always keen to hear from journalists, broadcasters, podcast hosts, and other media contacts about opportunities to discuss material related to my expertise: i.e. twentieth-century literature and its contexts. I've spoken on BBC Radio 3 and BBC Radio 4, and I've appeared on several podcasts. I self-produce the education-focused podcast Reading Orwell. My literary agent is Matthew Marland of RCW Literary Agency.