Staff

Centre Directors

Dr Amy Burge

Dr Amy Burge

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.

Email
a.burge@bham.ac.uk

Dr Rachel Sykes

Dr Rachel Sykes

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. 

Telephone
+44 (0)1214 158612
Email
r.sykes@bham.ac.uk

Staff in the Centre for Contemporary Literature and Culture

Dr Zoe Hope Bulaitis

Dr Zoe Hope Bulaitis

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 ...

Email
z.h.bulaitis@bham.ac.uk

Dr Dorothy Butchard

Dr Dorothy Butchard

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.

Email
d.butchard@bham.ac.uk

Dr Rona Cran

Dr Rona Cran

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.

Email
r.cran@bham.ac.uk

Dr Isabel Galleymore

Dr Isabel Galleymore

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. 

Email
i.galleymore@bham.ac.uk

Professor Ruth Gilligan

Professor Ruth Gilligan

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’).

Telephone
+44 (0)121 414 3596
Email
r.gilligan@bham.ac.uk

Dr Matt Hayler

Dr Matt Hayler

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 ...

Telephone
+44 (0)121 414 5825
Email
m.s.hayler@bham.ac.uk

Professor David James

Professor David James

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.

Email
d.james.1@bham.ac.uk

Dr Anna Metcalfe

Dr Anna Metcalfe

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.

Email
a.metcalfe@bham.ac.uk

Professor Peter Morey

Professor Peter Morey

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 ...

Telephone
+44 (0)121 414 5689
Email
p.morey@bham.ac.uk

Dr Jimmy Packham

Dr Jimmy Packham

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 ...

Email
j.packham@bham.ac.uk

Dr Rebecca Roach

Dr Rebecca Roach

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.

Telephone
+44 (0)121 414 8424
Email
r.roach@bham.ac.uk

Dr Asha Rogers

Dr Asha Rogers

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. 

Telephone
+44 (0)121 414 7946
Email
a.rogers.1@bham.ac.uk

Dr Fariha Shaikh

Dr Fariha Shaikh

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 ...

Telephone
0121 414 6038
Email
f.n.shaikh@bham.ac.uk

Professor Lyndsey Stonebridge

Professor Lyndsey Stonebridge

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 ...

Email
l.j.stonebridge@bham.ac.uk

Dr Sara K Wood

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 5681
Email
s.k.wood@bham.ac.uk

Dr Jarad Zimbler

Dr Jarad Zimbler

Senior Lecturer

Department of English Literature

I work on late nineteenth- and twentieth-century literatures in English, with a focus on decolonization and the Cold War. Much of my research has been concerned with the social and historical dimensions of literary form, and with how best to conceive the horizons of possibility that determine any work’s effects and meanings. To these ends, I draw on the methods of narratology, stylistics ...

Telephone
+44 (0)121 414 6206
Email
j.j.zimbler@bham.ac.uk