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

• BA (University of Birmingham)
• MPhil (University of Birmingham)
• PhD (University of Birmingham)
• PGCHE (University of Nottingham)
• FHEA (Fellow of the Higher Education Academy)

I’m a Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature in Birmingham’s Department of English Literature, where I’ve worked since 2017. For 2023-2026, alongside my regular duties at Birmingham, I will be a Visiting Fellow at Northumbria University. You can find more information about me at my personal website, here.

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.

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.

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.

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.