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

Photograph of Dr Nathan Waddell

Department of English Literature
Associate Professor in Twentieth-Century Literature

Contact details

Email
n.j.waddell@bham.ac.uk
View my research portal
Address
Arts Building
University of Birmingham
Edgbaston
Birmingham
B15 2TT
UK

I teach and research early twentieth-century literature, with a core emphasis on the life, work, and controversies of the painter and writer Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957). All of my research is collaborative—with students, postdoctoral scholars, university administrators, and individuals based outside of higher education—and I seek always to make my teaching similarly reciprocal, treating literary scholarship as an urgent conversation about culture and its indispensable place in the world.

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 an Associate Professor (Senior Lecturer) in Birmingham’s Department of English Literature, where I’ve worked since October 2017. For 2023-2026, alongside my regular duties at Birmingham, I will be a Visiting Fellow at Northumbria University. You can find out 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 various 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. Up-to-date information about my research can be found at my personal website.

Other activities

Much of my professional activity supports the scholars researching the life and work of Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957). I’ve acted as Chairperson of the Wyndham Lewis Society and I co-edited The Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies from 2010 to 2018. I’m a member of the Editorial Board of the Wyndham Lewis Complete Critical Edition commissioned by Oxford University Press. As of 2017 I have been a trustee of the Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust, a registered charity which promotes the study and preservation of Lewis’s output. I’m currently researching a scholarly edition of Lewis’s novel Snooty Baronet (1932) and writing a monograph assessing his complex and provocative responses to inter-war fascism.

Publications

Recent publications

Book

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 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 2022, ''Elements are VERY GLIB': challenging the convenience of metaphor in the critical reception of BLAST', Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies.

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

Waddell, N 2016, 'Lawrence Atkinson, Sculpture, and Vorticist Multimediality', Modernism/Modernity, vol. 1, no. 3. https://doi.org/10.26597/mod.0003

Chapter

Waddell, N 2023, George Orwell: Politics and Power. in R Potter & M Taunton (eds), A History of the British Novel of Ideas. 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.

Waddell, N 2016, Lewis and Fascism. in T Miller (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Wyndham Lewis. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 87-99. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781107284326

Waddell, N 2016, Signs of the T: Aldous Huxley, High Art, and American Technocracy. in J Greenberg & N Waddell (eds), ‘Brave New World’: Contexts and Legacies. Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 31-49.

View all publications in research portal