Academic staff

Our research in the Department of English Literature spans the full range of the subject, from Anglo-Saxon and Middle English to the Contemporary and the Post-Colonial.

To enhance individual research and foster collaboration, we organise our research supervision across five broad periods, with many colleagues contributing to the work of several of these groups. Each group has its own particular interests and specialisms within its period. 

Full list of Academic Staff in English Literature

Professor Hugh Adlington

Professor Hugh Adlington

Professor of English Literature

My research interests are primarily in the area of early modern literature (1500-1800), particularly religious poetry and prose, the works of John Donne, John Milton and Thomas Browne, the history of the book, textual editing, applications of computational linguistics to literary criticism, and genetic criticism. Selected works-in-progress include a monograph on John Donne's library and reading, ...

Dr Peter Auger

Dr Peter Auger

Lecturer in Early Modern Literature

I study the relationship between literature and cross-channel mobility in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. My research contributes to understanding imitation and translation practices, the history of reading, literary reception, women’s writing, comparative and transnational literature, literary multilingualism, cultural diplomacy and language learning.

Dr Laura Blunsden

Dr Laura Blunsden

Teaching Fellow

I joined the University of Birmingham in September 2024, having studied and taught at the University of Liverpool.

Dr Sheldon Brammall

Dr Sheldon Brammall

Associate Professor in Early Modern Literature

My research interests are in Renaissance English and comparative literature, with focuses on classical reception, translation, epic, and the history of classical scholarship.

Dr Emily Buffey

Teaching Fellow in Early Modern Literature

I teach across the historical spectrum – from the ancient period to the modern – though my main interests lie in the sixteenth century. I am particularly interested in ancient and medieval literary reception in the post-Reformation period, early modern print culture, women’s writing (particularly Aemilia Lanyer and Hester Pulter), literary communities, scribal practices, and the ...

Dr Amy Burge

Dr Amy Burge

Associate Professor in Popular Fiction

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.

Dr Dorothy Butchard

Dr Dorothy Butchard

Lecturer in Contemporary Literature & Digital Cultures

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.

Dr Megan Cavell

Dr Megan Cavell

Associate Professor

I work on a range of topics in medieval studies, from Old English and Latin languages and literature to riddles, animals and gender.

Dr Jennie Challinor

Dr Jennie Challinor

Teaching Fellow in Early Modern Literature

The main focus of my research is Restoration drama and poetry, and I also work on early modern manuscript and court cultures. I am currently preparing my first monograph, Playing Politics: Restoration Drama and Innovation, 1670-71, for publication with Manchester University Press, and I am editing two plays for The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Aphra Behn. I am also preparing a Malone Society ...

Dr Rona Cran

Dr Rona Cran

Associate Professor in Twentieth-Century American Literature
Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of North America

My scholarship is interdisciplinary and centres on the literature and culture of New York City, queer writing, and modern American poetry.

Dr Louise Curran

Dr Louise Curran

Associate Professor in Romanticism and Eighteenth-Century English Literature

I research eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, especially letter-writing and archive formation, prose style and the development of the novel, authorial reputation and literary celebrity, and the interplay between formal and material aspects of writing.

Dr Eleanor Dobson

Dr Eleanor Dobson

Associate Professor in Nineteenth-Century Literature

My current work focuses on the reception of ancient Egypt in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. More broadly, I am interested in the materiality and history of the book, as well as notions of the supernatural and the occult, particularly as these ideas operate at the edges of a range of scientific discourses. I teach literature from the late eighteenth century to the present, with particular ...

Dr John Fagg

Dr John Fagg

Senior Lecturer in American Literature and Cultures

My work focuses on American art and literature and visual art in the early twentieth century and explores the ways in which cultural forms adapted to the new circumstances of American modernity.

Dr Jessica Fay

Dr Jessica Fay

Teaching Fellow in Eighteenth and Early-Nineteenth Century English Literature

I study eighteenth and nineteenth-century literature (chiefly the work of William and Dorothy Wordsworth). I am interested in patterns of formal and generic innovation, and in exploring how memory, imagination, and art shape the identities of places and people.

Dr Victoria Flood

Dr Victoria Flood

Senior Lecturer in Medieval and Early Modern Literature

My research explores pre-modern historical and legendary content, alongside its later reception histories. My work has a particular focus on cross-border translation and transmission, as well as the application of digital humanities approaches to contemporary community-based research. I am co-PI on the Alexander von Humboldt-funded international network Crossing Borders in the Insular Middle ...

Professor Andrzej Gasiorek

Professor Andrzej Gasiorek

Professor of Twentieth Century Literature

My research concentrates mainly on twentieth-century British literature, with a particular focus on modernism. I’ve published widely in this area. Key publications include such monographs as Postwar British Fiction: Realism and After (1995), Wyndham Lewis and Modernism (2003), J. G. Ballard (2005), and, most recently, A History of Modernist Literature(2015), as well as a number of ...

Dr Rosie Graham

Dr Rosie Graham

Lecturer in Contemporary Literature and the Digital

My research and teaching explore contemporary digital culture by placing certain programs, platforms or services within a wider cultural and philosophical context. In particular, my current work draws on critical theory in order to address search engines as convergences of language, programming, and culture on a global scale. 

Dr David Griffith

Dr David Griffith

Senior Lecturer in English Medieval Studies

My primary area of research is the later medieval period into the early sixteenth century.  I work on medieval epigraphy, vernacularity, memorialisation, antiquarianism, and relations between textual and visual cultures, with a particular focus upon in the parish church.  I also have interests in writings of and about the First World War, especially prose writers of the 1910s and 20s ...

Dr Dave Gunning

Dr Dave Gunning

Reader in English Literature

I teach and research contemporary Anglophone literature and postcolonial studies.

Dr Nicholas Hardy

Dr Nicholas Hardy

Birmingham Fellow

Please note: as of September 2019 I am on a five-year leave of absence from the University to work full time for the University and College Union (UCU). During this period I will not be teaching or supervising students, or commencing any new research projects. Please continue to contact me at my University email address, but be advised that I will be checking it less regularly than ...

Professor Alexandra Harris

Professor Alexandra Harris

Birmingham Professorial Fellow

I enjoy thinking and writing about British art and literature of all periods, especially in relation to landscape, locality and the presence of the past. I am the author of ‘Romantic Moderns’ and ‘Weatherland: Writers and Artists under English Skies’, and my current projects include work on Virginia Woolf; seasonal ceremony and the marking of time; antiquarianism and local ...

Dr Matt Hayler

Dr Matt Hayler

Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Literature and Digital Cultures

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 ...

Dr Oliver Herford

Dr Oliver Herford

Associate Professor in Nineteenth Century Literature

I work on British and American literature of the long nineteenth century, with a special focus on the late writings of Henry James. I am interested in the place of style in literary non-fiction, the practice of editing, and the relations between personal correspondence and other types of life-writing (autobiography, biography, and memoir). I teach widely across eighteenth-, nineteenth- and ...

Dr Andrew Hodgson

Dr Andrew Hodgson

Senior Lecturer in Poetry

I teach and write about English poetry.

Professor John Holmes

Professor John Holmes

Professor of Victorian Literature and Culture

I joined the department in 2015 as Professor of Victorian Literature and Culture. My research focuses on the relationship between scientific ideas and cultural forms in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including poetry, architecture and the visual arts. More widely, I work on and teach a wide range of nineteenth-century literature, with interests in poetry and poetic form, especially the ...

Professor David James

Professor David James

Chair in Modern and Contemporary 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.

Dr Toria Johnson

Dr Toria Johnson

Associate Professor in Early Modern Literature

I teach across the late medieval, early modern, and Restoration periods. My research focuses on the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, early modern subjectivity, and the history of emotions.

Professor Tom Lockwood

Professor Tom Lockwood

Professor of English Literature

My teaching and research interests move across the early modern period, through Shakespeare and into the Romantic period, with a particular focus on the way in which later writers respond to, adapt and use earlier writers. My current teaching includes leading seminars on Shakespeare’s Tragedies (final year) and Poetry (first year), as well as lectures across my areas of expertise. My ...

Professor Deborah Longworth

Professor Deborah Longworth

Professor of English Literature
Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Education)

As PVC Education, Deborah is a member of University Executive Board, and supports the Vice-Chancellor in setting and implementing University strategy, with a specific strategic remit for excellence and innovation in teaching and learning. She provides academic leadership across the education portfolio, working closely with colleagues across the five Colleges, and with our Professional Services ...

Dr Rosy Mack

Dr Rosy Mack

Teaching Fellow

As a researcher I'm fascinated by activist cultural production - the infrastructure which supports it, the labour which goes into it and how it proliferates into the wider culture.  I use archival records from cultural institutions alongside oral history interviews to understand social movement cultural production. My work is informed by literary studies, feminist scholarship, social ...

Professor Rebecca N Mitchell

Professor Rebecca N Mitchell

Professor in Victorian Literature and Culture
Head of Department of English Literature

My scholarship focuses on Victorian literature and culture broadly defined, and I’m especially intrigued by the study and depiction of the creative process, the self/other relationship, and the textual/visual interface; these interests also drive my work in textual editing. I teach across the long nineteenth century.

Dr Sebastian Mitchell

Dr Sebastian Mitchell

Senior Lecturer in English Literature

My research work focuses on eighteenth-century and Romantic literature and culture, and utopian writing. I am especially interested in the relationship between literary and visual culture. My latest book, Utopia and Its Discontents: Plato to Atwood, was published by Bloomsbury Press in February 2020, and I’m currently at work on a study for Edinburgh University Press with the provisional ...

Dr Eva Momtaz

Research Fellow

I am a Research Fellow for the 'Empathy, Narrative, and Cultural Values' (ENCV) project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). This involves investigating how cultural values shape the way people connect with narratives in education and health. My previous research delved into understanding how modern Muslim readers engage with Milton’s work, offering valuable insights ...

Professor Daniel Moore

Professor Daniel Moore

Professor of English Literature
Head of English Drama and Creative Studies

I work on nineteenth and twentieth century literature and visual culture. I have published work on Henry James, Ford Madox Ford, Vernon Lee, Walter Pater and a range of other late Victorian and modernist art and literature.

Professor Peter Morey

Professor Peter Morey

Chair in 20th Century 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 ...

Dr Chris Mourant

Dr Chris Mourant

Lecturer in Early Twentieth-Century English Literature
Co-Director of the Centre for Modernist Cultures

I research twentieth-century prose fiction, with particular emphasis on modernism, empire and transnationalism, periodical studies and media history, and textual scholarship. My first monograph critically re-examined the writings of Katherine Mansfield. Currently, I am at work on a scholarly edition of E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924) for CUP.

Dr Jimmy Packham

Dr Jimmy Packham

Associate Professor in North American 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 ...

Katherine Parsons

Katherine Parsons

Research Associate

I am a Research Associate on the Stuart Hall Archive Project (2023-2026).

Dr Rebecca Roach

Dr Rebecca Roach

Senior Lecturer in Contemporary 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.

Dr Olivia (Liv) Robinson

Dr Olivia (Liv) Robinson

Lecturer in Late Medieval Literature

My work focuses on Anglo-French literary cultures and on medieval theatre, particularly theatre copied and performed by medieval women.  I am currently working on a research project on drama in medieval women’s religious houses. The Medieval Convent Drama Project, which is fully funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, explores the theatrical cultures and activities of medieval ...

Dr Asha Rogers

Dr Asha Rogers

Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Postcolonial 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. 

Professor Max Saunders

Professor Max Saunders

Interdisciplinary Professor of Modern Literature and Culture

I work on modern literature and culture. My main areas of interest are modernism, the literature of the First World War, life writing, literary impressionism, and futurology.

  • Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, 2 vols (Oxford University Press, 1996)
  • Self-Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction and the Forms of Modern Literature (Oxford University Press, 2010)
  • Imagined Futures: Writing, Science ...

Dr Philippa Semper

Dr Philippa Semper

Senior Lecturer in English

My work centres on Old English language and literature and the interaction between text and image in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts; I also write about and teach modern fantasy literature and its relationships with medieval texts.

Dr Fariha Shaikh

Dr Fariha Shaikh

Associate Professor in Victorian 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 ...

Dr Will Sharpe

Dr Will Sharpe

Teaching Fellow in Shakespeare

My teaching and research interests focus on the early modern period, and Shakespeare in particular, chiefly, in my research, on the textual editing and collaborative authorship of Shakespeare’s plays.

Professor Lyndsey Stonebridge

Professor Lyndsey Stonebridge

Interdisciplinary Chair of Humanities and Human Rights

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 ...

Dr Rachel Sykes

Dr Rachel Sykes

Associate Professor in Contemporary Literature and Culture

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. 

Dr Emilie Taylor-Pirie

Dr Emilie Taylor-Pirie

Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow

I specialise in literature and science studies, medical humanities, and the cultural history of medicine, especially in the long nineteenth century. I have an interdisciplinary background with a BSc (hons.) in biology and higher degrees in the humanities. My research interests include: Victorian literature and culture, particularly Gothic fiction and the scientific romance; postcolonialism, ...

Dr Emily Vincent

Dr Emily Vincent

Research Fellow

My research focuses on disease and the Gothic in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature. As a Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham, I survey British detective fiction, Gothic fiction, and periodicals to investigate narrative representations of influenza. My previous work has focused on maternal grief, spiritualism, and women’s ghost stories at the fin de siècle.

My ...

Professor Nathan Waddell

Professor Nathan Waddell

Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature

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).

Dr Matthew Ward

Dr Matthew Ward

Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature

My work focuses on British Romanticism, and the literature and intellectual history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Within these parameters I’m especially interested in William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, and Percy Shelley, poetry and poetics, periodization, literary inheritance, theories of humour, the history of emotions, sounds in literature and modes of listening, and ecology ...

Dr Hazel Wilkinson

Dr Hazel Wilkinson

Senior Lecturer

I research the literary culture of the long eighteenth century, and my specialisms include eighteenth-century publications of renaissance poetry and drama, digital humanities, and the poetry of Alexander Pope.

Dr Emily Wingfield

Dr Emily Wingfield

Senior Lecturer

I’m a Lecturer in English Literature. I teach pre-1800 literature, with a particular focus on the Medieval and Renaissance periods. As a researcher, I work on medieval Scottish literature. I am particularly interested in romance, manuscript study, and book history.

Dr Sara K Wood

Associate Professor in American Literature and Culture

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.

Professor Gillian Wright

Professor Gillian Wright

Professor of English and Irish Literature

I hold a chair in English and Irish Literature. My research and teaching both focus on literature from the early modern period, and in particular on poetry, women’s writing, and book history and editing. I am a General Editor on the AHRC-funded Cambridge edition of The Works of Aphra Behn, for which I am editing Behn’s poetry. I also teach contemporary Irish fiction. 

I am ...

Emeritus and Honorary Staff

Dr Maureen Bell

Dr Maureen Bell

Honorary Reader in English Literature

Now retired from the University, I continue to contribute to the University’s research profile as Director of the British Book Trade Index and through my continuing research and publications.

Dr Roxanne Douglas

Dr Roxanne Douglas

Honorary Research Fellow

Dr Roxanne Douglas specialises in bringing together feminist theory, World-Literature theories, and Gothic studies, with a focus on Arab feminist writing in translation. She is also interested in women’s writing across borders, gendered history, sexuality studies, World-Systems approaches, and GoHoW (Gothic, Horror, and the Weird) across literary forms.

 

Professor Steve Ellis

Professor Steve Ellis

Emeritus Professor of English Literature

I have published many volumes of literary criticism on a wide range of authors, including Dante, Chaucer, T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf, plus three collections of poetry and a verse translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. My latest monograph is British Writers and the Approach of World War II (Cambridge University Press, 2014).

 

Dr Richard Fallon

Dr Richard Fallon

Honorary Research Fellow

I study interactions and overlaps between literature and science, focusing on the long nineteenth century. Within this area my specialisms are the literature of the earth sciences, scientific writing for general readers, and turn-of-the-century adventure novels. My earlier work has examined the literary popularisation of dinosaurs and my current project is called ‘Borderline Geoscience and ...

Dr Kate Rumbold

Dr Kate Rumbold

Honorary Associate Professor

I’m an Honorary Associate Professor in English Literature. My research explores the ways in which Shakespeare is quoted and valued in literature and culture, from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century. Writers and artists of all kinds have quoted Shakespeare since his own lifetime. My research has shown how the very act of quotation conferred status and authority on Shakespeare, and ...

Professor Valerie Rumbold

Professor Valerie Rumbold

Professor Emeritus

My main enthusiasm is for eighteenth-century poetry and satire, particularly the work of Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, and I have a special interest in textual editing, having produced, over the last few years, editions of Pope’s Dunciad and of hoaxes and parodies by Swift.

Professor Wendy Scase

Professor Wendy Scase

Emeritus Geoffrey Shepherd Professor of Medieval English Literature

I am a specialist in medieval English language and literature with strong manuscripts, archival, and interdisciplinary experience. My work addresses questions that trouble the conventional boundaries between literary and other discourses, and is informed by the belief that medieval textual research can contribute to cultural history and enrich theory and practice in English studies. I became ...

Professor Marcus Walsh

Professor Marcus Walsh

Honorary Senior Research Fellow

Now retired, I continue to research and publish in the literature of the long eighteenth-century. I am a General Editor and volume editor of the Oxford UP Oxford Writings of Alexander Pope.

Dr Emma West

Dr Emma West

Honorary Research Fellow

My research examines the relationship between modernism and popular culture in early- and mid-twentieth century Britain. My British Academy postdoctoral project, Revolutionary Red Tape (2017-22), examined how public servants and official committees helped to commission, disseminate and popularise modern British art, design, literature and culture.