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

Photograph of Dr Nathan Waddell

Department of English Literature
Professor of 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 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. 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 42-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 (ed.) 2026, George Orwell in Context. Literature in Context, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Waddell, N 2025, A Bright Cold Day: The Wonder of George Orwell. Oneworld, London. <https://oneworld-publications.com/work/a-bright-cold-day/>

Waddell, N (ed.) 2025, The Oxford Handbook of George Orwell. Oxford Handbooks, Oxford University Press, Oxford. <https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-oxford-handbook-of-george-orwell-9780198860693>

Waddell, N (ed.), Kondo, N (Translator), Fukunishi, Y (Translator), Oki, Y (Translator), Sato, Y (Translator), Takahashi, K (Translator), Nakamura, A (Translator), Maetsu, T (Translator) & Watanabe, H (Translator) 2025, Jōji Ōweru "Senkyūhyakuhachijūyonen" no Genzai-chi: Bungaku, Shisō, Media no Kōsaten. translated by Naoki Kondo, Yumiko Fukunishi, Yumi Oki, Yoshio Sato, Kazuma Takahashi, Asami Nakamura, Tomoko Maetsu, Hiroshi Watanabe, Suiseisha, Tokyo. <http://www.suiseisha.net/blog/?p=21369>

Article

Waddell, N 2025, 'Wyndham Lewis Reading (and Misreading?) George Orwell', George Orwell Studies, vol. 9, no. 2, pp. 63-90.

Waddell, N 2024, '‘A sinking sensation’: George Orwell and the RMS Titanic', George Orwell Studies, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 33-54.

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>

Chapter

Waddell, N 2026, A Genre Redefined: Misery, Noise, and Trauma in Nineteen Eighty-Four. in G Claeys (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Dystopian Literature. Cambridge Companions to Literature, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Waddell, N 2026, Orwell and Death. in T Crook & RL Keeble (eds), The Routledge Companion to George Orwell. Routledge, London.

Waddell, N 2026, Packaging Orwell: Sequences and Centrifuges. in P Rae (ed.), Approaches to Teaching the Works of George Orwell. Modern Language Association of America.

Waddell, N & Cook, E 2025, Orwell and John Milton. in N Waddell (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of George Orwell. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 147-61.

Waddell, N 2024, George Orwell: Politics and Power. in R Potter & M Taunton (eds), The British Novel of Ideas: George Eliot to Zadie Smith. 1 edn, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 259-273. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009086745.016

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.

Comment/debate

Waddell, N & Newman, S 2025, ''Orwell makes fun of Winston a lot. And a lot of readers miss that': Nathan Waddell interviews Sandra Newman, author of the internationally acclaimed Juliai', George Orwell Studies, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 59-65. <https://www.abramis.co.uk/george-orwell-studies/issues.htm>

Waddell, N & Hurst, L 2025, '‘Tracing the Ordinary Everyday (and the Importance of Chocolate) in Orwell’: Nathan Waddell interviewed by Les Hurst, regarding Waddell’s A Bright Cold Day (2025)', George Orwell Studies, vol. 9, no. 2, pp. 123-137.

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.