Dr Dorothy Butchard

Department of English Literature
Lecturer in Contemporary Literature and Digital Cultures

Contact details

Email: d.butchard@bham.ac.uk
Twitter: @dkbutchard

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.

Qualifications

BA English Literature (University of Cambridge)
MSc Literature and Transatlanticism (University of Edinburgh)
PhD English Literature (University of Edinburgh)

Biography

I joined Birmingham as a Teaching Fellow in 2016 and was appointed Lecturer in Contemporary Literature and Digital Cultures in 2017. Before this, I was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Edinburgh’s Institute for Advanced Studies in the Arts and Humanities (IASH), after completing my doctoral thesis and masters at the University of Edinburgh.

Teaching

I teach on the following undergraduate modules: New World Orders, Transatlantic Literary Relations (Convenor), Prose, Discovering American Literature (Convenor) and the postgraduate MA Module Textualities and Materialities. I am also contributing lectures for Plays and Performance and Writing London.

Research

I research and teach contemporary literature and digital cultures, with particular interest in creative responses to emerging technologies in the twentieth and twenty-first century.

My research traces connections between contemporary literature, digital cultures, and lived experience. I explore how fiction, poetry and pop culture reflect on emerging digital platforms and their impact in communities and environments. My work focuses on interconnected themes of digital wellbeing, surveillance studies, environmental change, and the health effects of transforming technologies and infrastructures.

I have published articles and chapters on contemporary contexts and imagined futures in genre fiction, new media, digital poetics and experimental writing. My first monograph, Digital Anxiety (currently in process), discusses the intersection of digital technologies and literary writing in the decades around the turn of the millennium, showing how creative works published during this time reconfigured the anxieties of earlier eras to grapple with the uncertainties of an emerging "digital age."

I am theme lead for Imagining Wellbeing in the Centre for Urban Wellbeing, co-director of UoB's Centre for Digital Cultures, and am working on Midlands Mosaics, a community project based around the Eduardo Paolozzi mosaics in Redditch, UK.

Other activities

I have spoken on my research at conferences and events across the UK and internationally. Most recently I have given talks on transatlantic communications in contemporary fiction (IASH, 2016) and surveillance poetics (Secret Poetry, 2016).

In addition to speaking at conferences, I’ve convened and/or co-organised a number of events, talks and symposiums in recent years. These include a workshop on the theme of "Atlantic Exchanges" (Edinburgh, Spring 2016), two events on new directions in academic publishing (Stirling, 2016 and 2017), and a conference themed around aesthetic representations of "Information Overload" (Edinburgh, 2014).

I co-convene the Postgraduate Doctoral Seminar for PhD students in English Literature at Birmingham.