Arya AryanArya Aryan has recently completed his PhD in Postmodernist, Feminist and Contemporary literature under the supervision of Professor Patricia Waugh and is currently a teaching assistant in the Department of English Studies. His dissertation entitled “The Authorship Question and the Rise of Postmodernist Fiction: From Madness to Agency” examines conceptions of authorship before, during and after the historical moment of the emergence of the concept of the death of the author. He is currently preparing his first monograph on the topic of authorship since the 1950s to the present. He was also a co-editor of Postgraduate English: A Journal and Forum for Postgraduates in English and is a reviewer of the Durham English Review: An Undergraduate Journal.
SrishtiSrishti is a young researcher, pursuing a postgraduate degree in Social Work from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India. She is specialising in women centred practices, with an interest in researching the socialisation of adolescent girls in informal school settings, using Sanskrit, a classical language as a tool, in India. As part of her field work, she has extensively worked with young children living in Children’s Homes in Mumbai.
Keri ThomasKeri Thomas is an FE lecturer and Doctor of English Literature, achieving her doctorate in 2016 with her work entitled Hengwrt Chaucer: Cultural Capital in the Digital Domain. The thesis examined digitisation through the work of Bourdieu and incorporated ethnographic interviews with seven key actors working in the field of digital humanities. As an independent scholar her work continues to look at digitisation through a theoretical frame, examining issues of physicality and the impact of digitisation on our relationship with medieval manuscripts. She likes Neil Gaiman, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, and red wine. You can tweet her @keri_thomas.
Andreas TheodorouAndreas Theodorou is an independent scholar having completed a BA and MRes in English at Liverpool John Moores University and going on to become a British Library Labs Researcher in Residence. His research observes medical and digital humanities, focusing on simulated terror and play in contemporary Gothic video-games. In his spare time, Andreas is also a culinary hobbyist, baker, and the author and artist behind Beyond the Darkness.
John RoacheJohn Roache is Lecturer in Twentieth-Century Literature at the University of Manchester. His work focuses on the crossovers between archival research and critical theory, with a special focus on the contemporary legacies of modernist and postmodernist aesthetics. He is currently working on a monograph concerning the question of textual, social, and political marginality in the work ofauthors such as William Blake, Djuna Barnes, and David Foster Wallace.
Sophie JonesSophie Jones is a doctoral researcher in the Department of English and Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London. Her AHRC-funded PhD examines the way discourses of media and technology intersect with the politics of reproduction in US literature and film between the late 1950s and the early 1970s. In 2011-2012, she was a British Research Council Fellow at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C.
Donna AlexanderDonna Maria Alexander is currently a postdoctoral researcher at University College Cork. Her research interests include contemporary poetry, adaptation studies, postcolonialism, electronic literature and digital pedagogy. Her forthcoming monograph, Weeder of Wreckage: Documentary and Death in the Poetry of Lorna Dee Cervantes (Peter Lang) was the recipient of the runner-up prize in the Peter Lang Young Scholar’s Competition in Women’s Studies, 2015. Donna was awarded a UCC President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2018 after being nominated by students.
Daniel RourkeDaniel Rourke is a writer and digital hoarder currently finalising a practice-based PhD at Goldsmiths, University of London. His research concerns the representation of mutation in digital cultures and the post-humanities. Daniel's portfolio confounds his best interests at machinemachine.net/portfolio.
Rob GallagherDr Rob Gallagher is a postdoctoral research fellow at Concordia University’s Technoculture, Art and Games centre. His PhD thesis, completed at the London Consortium, addressed digital games and the embodied experience of time. His current work considers games as fiction, drawing on platform studies and queer theory to engage questions of affectivity, gender and identity.
Tavleen SinghTavleen Singh is a young researcher, pursuing a postgraduate degree in Social Work from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India. She is specialising in public health with an interest in understanding experiences of pregnant women during genetic counselling, an emerging field in India. As part of her field work, she has extensively worked with young children living in Children’s Homes in Mumbai.
Victoria AddisVictoria Addis is a PhD student at the University of Leeds where her research examines the concept of ecomasculinity in contemporary US fiction that invokes or reimagines the Old West and/or Western tropes. She is the recipient of three postgraduate essay prizes (BACLS 2017; BAAS 2018; ISAANZ 2019) and has published in venues including Studies in Comics, Western American Literature, and US Studies Online. Alongside her PhD, Victoria works as a blogger for the literary journal Ploughshares.
Hauwa AhmaduHauwa Aliyu Ahmadu is an alumna of York St John University and the University of Oxford. Her research interests include Afrofuturism, Japanese literature, fan cultures and transmedia storytelling. Hauwa received the Clarendon Fund Scholarship to study a Master's Degree in Japanese Studies at Oxford and has taught scholarship candidates on the Ashinaga Africa Initiative in Uganda.
Joseph AndertonDr Joseph Anderton is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Birmingham City University. He is the author of Beckett’s Creatures: Art of Failure after the Holocaust (Bloomsbury, 2016) and is currently in the early stages of his second book, Writing Homelessness: Rough Sleeping in Contemporary British Literature. Joseph has research interests in modernism and its legacies, dehumanisation and the nonhuman, and has published articles on Beckett, Kafka, Coetzee, and Auster on these topics.
Marni AppletonMarni Appleton is a PhD candidate in creative-critical writing at the University of East Anglia, where she also teaches. Her doctoral research comprises a collection of short stories and a critical thesis which examines (post)feminist feeling in contemporary short stories about girlhood. Marni's short stories have been published in literary journals such as The Tangerine and Banshee.
Jacquelyn ArnoldDr Jacquelyn Arnold completed her doctoral research at London Metropolitan University in 2014. Her PhD, British Civil Defence Policy in Response to the Threat of Nuclear Attack 1972 – 1986, analysed the genesis and development of civil defence during the last two decades of the Cold War by examining the ways in which policies were shaped by economic, ideological and political factors.
Bryan BankerBryan Banker is a PhD candidate at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. His research focuses on how 20th century black intellectual artists used literature and performance as the analytical process in which to negotiate their political, social, and aesthetic consciousnesses.
Sophie BantleSophie-Constanze Bantle (she/her) is a Master student in British and North American Cultural Studies at the University of Freiburg, Germany. Her research interests include adaptation studies, Neo-Victorianism, and detective fiction. Her MA thesis was concerned with Neo-Victorian detective fiction on television, and she will continue her exploration of this topic in her upcoming PhD studies.
Alexander BeaumontDr Alexander Beaumont is Lecturer in English Literature at York St. John University with research interests in post-war British culture, Thatcherism and the British Left, and contemporary representations of the city. His essay “‘New Times Television? Channel 4 and My Beautiful Laundrette” appears in Thatcher and After. He recently published a monograph entitled Contemporary British Fiction and the Cultural Politics of Disenfranchisement (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), and has essays in Contemporary Literature (55.2) and Maggie Gee: Critical Essays (Gylphi, 2015). He is currently working on post-devolution representations of northern England and everyday life.
Richard BinghamRichard Bingham is a doctoral researcher in English Literature at the University of Birmingham, where he co-convenes PLAY/PAUSE, a seminar series fuelling academic discussion of video games and virtual reality. His PhD thesis is titled 'Digital Natives: Imagining the Millennial in Twenty-First Century Fiction'. His research interests include digital cultures, critical theory and twenty-first century aesthetic realism.
Twitter: @binghari
Dana BönischDana Bönisch, author of the novel Rocktage (2003), currently works in the department of Comparative Literature at the University of Bonn where she is also working on her PhD exploring narratives of terrorism from the 1970s until the war on terror.
Lola BoormanDr Lola Boorman is an Associate Lecturer at the University of York where she also completed her PhD in January 2020. Her research focusses on the role of grammar in twentieth-century American literature through the work of Gertrude Stein, Lydia Davis, and David Foster Wallace.
Astrid BrackeDr Astrid Bracke is Lecturer in English Literature at Radboud University Nijmegen and the University of Amsterdam. She works primarily on ecocriticism and contemporary literature with a special interest in the challenges that non-traditional natural spaces such as cities pose to ecocriticism and contemporary imaginations of nature in general.
Joseph BrookerJoseph Brooker is Reader in Modern Literature and Director of the Centre for Contemporary Literature at Birkbeck, University of London. His most recent book is Literature of the 1980s (2010).
Alistair BrownDr Alistair Brown is an Associate Lecturer at the Open University, teaching courses on the arts and literature, and a Postdoctoral Teaching Assistant in English at Durham University, where he also edits the impact blog Research in English At Durham. His PhD on Demonic Fictions: Cybernetics and Postmodernism was completed in 2009.
Dorothy ButchardDr Dorothy Butchard completed her PhD at the University of Edinburgh in 2015. Her research explores literary portrayals of new and changing technologies, focusing on depictions of contemporary cultural anxieties, materiality and marginalised voices.
Alex CalderAlex J. Calder has recently graduated from an MSc Literature and Modernity programme at the University of Edinburgh. His research interests include artful forms of contemporary literature, precariousness, feminism, and intertextuality in twenty-first-century fiction.
Christos Callow Jr.Dr Christos Callow Jr is an Associate Tutor at Birkbeck, University of London, where he has recently completed his PhD dissertation “Etherotopia, an Ideal State and a State of Mind: Utopian Philosophy as Literature and Practice.” He has published fiction in such places as Cosmos, Polluto, Impossible Spaces and The Mad Scientist Journal.
Beth CapoBeth Widmaier Capo is a professor of English and director of the honors program at Illinois College in Jacksonville, Illinois, USA. She is the author of Textual Contraception: Birth Control and Modern American Fiction (2007), co-editor of Reproductive Rights Issues in Popular Media: International Perspectives (2017), and has published articles on 20th and 21st century fiction, pedagogy, and gender studies.
Gary CharlesGary Charles is an interdisciplinary researcher and artist, working across sound, moving image, installation, and conceptual practice. Gary also releases music under a number of monikers, including releases on High Strung Young and Flash Recordings as The Static Hand, and improvised electronics as part of improvisation collective, The Cosmic Asunder. His current research looks at the emergence of Artificial Intelligence approaches in cultural production, particularly in relation to creativity within contemporary art and music cultures. Through both research and practice, his focus is on uncovering the assumptions, misdirections and biases embedded in the models, as well as the protocols that underpin them. Gary is currently a PhD candidate at University of Birmingham, and teaches Synthesis, Audio and Cultural Theory at the British and Irish Modern Music Institute (BIMM).
Ruth CharnockDr Ruth Charnock is Lecturer in English at the University of Lincoln. She is currently at work on a monograph on the writer Anaïs Nin, an edited collection on Joni Mitchell, and a book-length project on care and caring in contemporary America fiction, from which her first article derives.
Sarah ChihayaDr Sarah Chihaya is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Princeton University, where she specializes in contemporary fiction and film, and is currently at work on her first book, The Unseen World: Metanarrative and Forms of Contemporary Fiction. Her writing has recently appeared in Public Books, Modern Fiction Studies, and C21 Literature: 21st Century Writings, and she is the editor of Contemporaries at Post45. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley.
Rowena ClarkeRowena Clarke is a PhD student in the English Department at Boston College in Boston, Massachusetts. Her research focuses on the literature and culture of post-war Britain and America. Rowena co-convenes the Contemporary Literature and Globalization research group at Boston College,and has served as a teaching assistant and section leader for the undergraduate course The City in Film and Literature.
Martyn James ColebrookDr Martyn James Colebrook is an independent researcher. He completed a PhD focusing on the novels of Iain (M.) Banks and co-edited the first collection of scholarly essays, The Transgressive Iain Banks with Katharine Cox (McFarland 2013). He has published individually and collaboratively within the field of twentieth century fiction with chapters including “Contemporary Scottish Crime Fiction and Terrorism”, “The Wasp Factory, the Gothic and Mental Disorder”, “Paul Auster and Alienation”, “China Mieville and H.P. Lovecraft”, “Iain (M.) Banks and John Fowles”, and “Gordon Burn, Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son and the Yorkshire Ripper".
Sarah CollierSarah Collier is a PhD student in English Literature at UCL. Her research explores representations of military masculinities in contemporary American war narratives.
Michael J. CollinsDr Michael J. Collins is Lecturer in American Literature at the University of Kent and author of The Drama of the American Short Story 1800-1865 (University of Michigan Press).
Daniel CordleDr Daniel Cordle is Reader in English and American Literature at Nottingham Trent University. He is the author of States of Suspense: The Nuclear Age, Postmodernism and United States Fiction and Prose (Manchester University Press, 2008) and is currently completing a book, Late Cold War Literature and Culture: The Nuclear 1980s (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016/17), theorising the final decade of the nuclear Cold War.
Marianne CorriganMarianne Corrigan is a final year PhD student under the supervision of Dr Nick Bentley at Keele University. Marianne's research examines globalization, discourses of inter-connectivity and narrative migrancy in the later novels of Salman Rushdie.
Rebekah CunninghamRebekah Cunningham is a PhD candidate at the University of Birmingham, researching videogame dynamism and community reciprocity and its effects on videogame production and research. She co-created the Play/Pause network, which hosts seminars and events in the Midlands that explore a variety of themes and discussions around videogames and virtual reality.
Christopher DaleyDr Christopher Daley works at Brunel University London where he holds two roles. He works, primarily, in the library as a Research Publications Officer. In addition to his work with the library, Christopher is also a researcher and lecturer in English Literature, specialising in the interaction between popular culture and the politics of the Cold War.
Orlaith DarlingOrlaith Darling is a PhD candidate in the School of English, Trinity College Dublin. Her doctoral project – which examines representations of neoliberalism in contemporary Irish women’s short fiction – is fully funded by the Irish Research Council. Previously, Orlaith obtained an MSc. with Distinction in Literature and Modernity from the University of Edinburgh (2019) and a BA (Hons.) with first class honours in English Literature and History from Trinity College Dublin (2018), where she was elected Scholar in 2016. She is a co-founder of Contemporary Irish Literature research network (CIL) and co-producer of the The Hublic Sphere Podcast, Season 2. Her work has been published in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Literature, Feminist Media Studies, Contemporary Women’s Writing, Irish Studies Review, Estudios Irlandeses, Rejoinder, FORUM, The Modernist Review and Alluvium, as well as on several academic blogs. She is currently based in Trinity Long Room Hub Arts Humanities Research Institute.
Joe P. L. DavidsonJoe P. L. Davidson is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge. His thesis is focused on the relationship between temporality and utopia. It utilises a range of utopian texts to develop a critical social theoretical account of the crisis of the future. He has recently published on retrotopian feminist fiction in Feminist Theory, neo-Victorian utopianism in the European Journal of Cultural Studies, and W. E. B. Du Bois’s sociology of the future in The Sociological Review, as well as a review of Courttia Newland’s A River Called Time (2021) in Strange Horizons.
Diletta De CristofaroDiletta De Cristofaro is a Teaching Fellow in English Literature at the University of Birmingham. She researches twenty-first and twentieth-century North American and British fiction. Her main research interest is the nexus of narrative and time, with a particular focus on the contemporary post-apocalyptic novel.
Francesco Di BernardoDr Francesco Di Bernardo completed his PhD in Modern and Contemporary Literature, Culture and Thought at the University of Sussex. He is currently Associate Tutor at the School of English at Sussex, having previously worked as Research Support Assistant in Sussex’s School of Media, Film and Music. Francesco is currently also reviewer for the LSE Review of Books.
Andrea DietrichAndrea Dietrich is an Associate Lecturer at Anglia Ruskin University where she is also currently writing her PhD on existential agency in Science Fiction, 2010-2015. She is a graduate of Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz, Germany (BA, MA), Université de Bourgogne, France (MA) and Birkbeck University London (MA).
Zara DinnenDr Zara Dinnen is Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of Birmingham. Her research focuses on representations of the digital in contemporary American culture. Zara is Co-Organiser of the Contemporary Fiction Seminar at the Institute of English Studies and Reviews Editor for the AHRC-funded journal Dandelion.
Julia DitterJulia Ditter is a PhD candidate in English literature at Northumbria University, Newcastle-upon-Tyne (UK). She holds an M.A. in British and North American Cultural Studies from the University of Freiburg (Germany). Her research interests include British, Irish and Scottish literatures, cultural studies, border studies, animal studies, mobility studies and ecocriticism. Her current project focuses on the different forms in which borders and the environment are articulated in Scottish literature from the nineteenth century onwards.
Katharina DonnDr. Katharina Donn is a teacher, lecturer and author in 20th century and contemporary literature. Her monograph A Poetics of Trauma after 9/11 (Routledge, 2016) explores the entanglement of intimate vulnerability and virtual spectacle that is typical of the globalised present. Her current book project, The Politics of Literature in a Divided 21st Century (Routledge, forthcoming 2020) develops an ecocritical vision of political aesthetics. Katharina teaches at the Universität Augsburg in Germany and the University of Texas at Austin in the US, and has held research fellowships at the Institute of Advanced Studies, UCL and the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library. She has also explored questions of embodiment and precariousness in collaboration with performative artists, and has guest-edited the blogs “U.S. Studies Online: Forum for New Writing” and “Litro: Literary Magazine.”
Sebastien DoubinskySébastien Doubinsky is associate professor in the French section of the university of Aarhus, Denmark. His research fields cover translation, comparative studies and work reading theory. He co-authored Reading Literature Today with Tabish Khair, published by SAGE in 2011. He is also a bilingual novelist and poet.
Dennis DuncanDr Dennis Duncan is a lecturer in English Literature at Birkbeck, University of London. He is preparing a monograph on Translation and the Oulipo (2014) and is editor of the forthcoming Tom McCarthy: Critical Essays (Gylphi, 2012).
Harriet EarleDr Harriet Earle is an Associate Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature at Birkbeck, University of London. She recently completed her PhD in American Comics at Keele University and is currently preparing her first monograph on the topic of comics and and conflict trauma for the University Press of Mississippi. Her publications are spread across the field of comics, popular culture studies and contemporary American literature.
Peter ElyDr Peter Ely is a writer and academic based in London. His research explores the political significance of community in contemporary British literature.
Zita FarkasDr Zita Farkas Dr. Zita Farkas is a senior lecturer at the Department of Arts, Communication and Education, Luleå University of Technology, Sweden. Her current research focuses on the adaptations of classical literary texts to the digital medium.
Clare FisherClare Fisher is the author of All the Good Things (Viking, 2017) and How the Light Gets In (2018). Her work has won a Betty Trask Award and been longlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize and the Edgehill Short Story Prize. She is studying for a practice-led PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Leeds and teaches at Goldsmiths College and Queen Mary University of London.
Carleigh GarciaCarleigh Garcia is in the fourth year of her PhD at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick in the Language and Literature department. Her thesis, under the supervision of Dr Eoin Flannery, analyses seven Irish novels written between 1940 and 2007 through the lens of affect theory, with the aim of exploring the influence of the Catholic Church on social norms and shame in the Irish context. The novels included in the thesis include Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls, The Lonely Girl, Girls in Their Married Bliss, and their ‘Epilogue’, Eric Cross’ The Tailor and Antsy, Colm Toibin’s The Blackwater Lightship, John McGahern’s The Dark, and Anne Enright’s The Gathering. She works as a Departmental Assistant in her department, as well as Research Assistant to the Irish Institute for Catholic Studies.
Daniel GerkeDaniel Gerke recently completed his doctoral thesis at Swansea University, exploring the influence Western Marxist thinkers (Lukacs, Sartre and Gramsci) on the Welsh cultural critic and novelist Raymond Williams. His broader research focusses on the intersections between literature, politics and philosophy, particularly within the paradigms of Marxist humanism and the new realisms. Daniel has an article forthcoming in Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism on the revolutionary implications of Williams's empiricist Gramscianism.
Rhona GordonRhona Gordon is currently completing her PhD thesis at the University of Glasgow. Her research interests include post-1970s housing, the 1984-85 Miners’ Strike, post-Industrial landscapes and late-twentieth- and early twenty-first-century celebrity.
Daniel O' GormanDaniel O'Gorman is an Associate Lecturer in English at Oxford Brookes University, London South Bank University, and Royal Holloway, University of London. He has recently published an article on Dave Eggers and Judith Butler in Textual Practice, and has a piece on Iraq war fiction forthcoming in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction. Daniel's book Fictions of the War on Terror: Difference and the Transnational 9/11 Novel will be published by Palgrave Macmillan in July 2015.
Matthew GriffithsDr Matthew Griffiths recently completed his PhD in English Studies at Durham University under Professor Timothy Clark and Dr Jason Harding. His novel The Weather on Versimmon explores ecological themes in a science-fiction setting, and his debut poetry pamphlet, How to be Late, was published by Red Squirrel in 2013.
Andy HagemanAndy Hageman is an Associate Professor of English at Luther College. He teaches courses for the English department, Environmental Studies program, and Paideia first-year experience and capstones on ethics. Regular courses include American literature surveys and a course on the novel, film studies, and Paideia; his courses on EcoMedia and Science Fiction have been popular. researches the intersections of ecology, technology, and ideology. He publishes on subjects that range from ecology and infrastructure in science fiction from around the world (China, Iceland, etc.) to Twin Peaks, Star Trek, and the poetry of Gary Snyder.
Grace HaldenDr Grace Halden is a lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature at Birkbeck College, University of London. She has particular interest and expertise in the representations of technology in popular culture. Grace is currently working on a book on nuclear power in American popular culture, which ties into her fascination with technological influence and human response in the 20th and 21st Century.
Katharine HandelDr Katharine Handel received her PhD in Medieval Studies form the University of York in 2015. She specialises in Anglo-Norman literature of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, particularly hagiography. She currently works as a researcher at the Oxford English Dictionary.
Marie HendryMarie Hendry is Assistant Professor of Language and Literature at State College of Florida-Venice and is the author of the book Agency, Loneliness, and the Female Protagonist in the Victorian Novel.
Jonathan HoggDr Jon Hogg is Senior Lecturer in Twentieth Century History at the University of Liverpool. He researches and teaches the cultural and social history of the British nuclear state. His book British Nuclear Culture: Official and Unofficial Narratives in the Long Twentieth Century (Bloomsbury, 2016) offers a new interpretation of the British nuclear century by tracing the tensions between 'official' and 'unofficial' narratives.
Courtney HopfDr Courtney Hopf is a part-time lecturer in Brunel University's School of Arts and the acting manager of the universitiy's central learning development unit. She received her PhD from the University of California, Davis in December 2011, and is currently preparing a monograph based on her dissertation titled Story Networks: The Politics and Poetics of Mass-Collaboration.
Heidi James-DunbarDr Heidi James-Dunbar is a lecturer in English Literature and Creative Writing at Kingston University. She is author of The Mesmerist's Daughter (Apis Books, 2007) and Carbon (Blatt, 2009), which is currently being made into a film.
Anna JohnsonAnna Johnson is currently undertaking a PhD in Creative Writing at Kingston University. Her practice is one of poetic-prose life writing and her research focuses on the intersections of maternal studies, disability and illness writing, neurodiversity and queer theory. Anna’s PhD study explores the ways in which the language of the spectral – ghosts and hauntings – offers a possible route to the expression of difficult-to-articulate experiences, such as the strangeness of early motherhood. Anna’s practice of poetic-prose life writing deals with the complexity and ambivalence of early motherhood, offering something like an immersion into the affects of care. Anna aims to create writing that is made more poetic by its honesty and more honest by its poetics.
Anna’s recent publications include chapters in the collections, Women in Transition: Crossing Boundaries, Crossing Borders, Routledge, 2021, and From Band-Aids to Scalpels: Motherhood Experiences in/of Medicine, Demeter Press, 2021. Further details about her work and publications can be found at: https://annaotheranna.wixsite.com/mysite
Katie JonesKatie Jones is a recent PhD graduate with research interests in the history of psychoanalysis, critical theory, and life writing. Her PhD research, Improper Subjects: Confession, Shame, and Femininity, focuses on ‘confession’ as a narrative trope in semi-autobiographical fictions by twentieth- and twenty-first-century English- and German-language women writers. She has articles or reviews published or forthcoming in the Modern Language Review and gender forum.
Robert W. Jones IIRobert W. Jones II is a third year PhD student at the University of Leicester. He has written book reviews for the Journal of American Studies and is an occasional contributor to The Poetry Show on KUSP NPR Santa Cruz.
Raphael KaboRaphael Kabo is a postgraduate student, performance poet, and writer. He completed his undergraduate degree at the Australian National University and is about to embark on an MA in English Literature at King's College London with the support of a King's President's Scholarship. His work examines the relationships between contemporary subversive literature, spatiality, psychogeography, and urban existence, with a particular interest in the spatialities of contemporary protest literature from the UK and beyond.
Hannah KarminHannah Karmin is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at Cornell University. She received a BA from Yale University in 2012 and completed a post-baccalaureate in Classics at Columbia University in 2013. Her dissertation, titled “Lapsed Attentions, Classical and Modern”, investigates patterns of attention and distraction in James Joyce and Homer, Virginia Woolf and Euripides, and H.D. and Callimachus. She is currently working on a final chapter on contemporary, feminine (in)attention in the works of Anne Carson and Lucy Ellmann.
Arin KeebleArin Keeble is a Lecturer in Contemporary Literature and Culture at Edinburgh Napier University. His research focuses on the literary and cultural response to terrorism and disaster. It is driven by a belief that through analysis of the ways texts represent, undercut and/or reinforce the official narratives of terror and crisis it is possible to move beyond often limited and reductive understandings of these phenomena.
Anjum KhanDr. M. Anjum Khan is working as assistant professor of English in Avinashilingam Institute for Home Science and Higher Education for Women, Coimbatore. She has 7 years of teaching experience and 10 years of research experience. Her areas of research have been British Literature, Immigrant Canadian Literature and Cultural Literary Theories. However, she is interested in teaching subjects like history, literature, disability studies, and literary theories. She is author of 2 books - Ethnic Silhouettes, M.G. Vassanji in the Light of New Historicism and Narrating Bodies, Reading Anosh Irani. She has published several research articles in reputed national and international journals, chapters in books and presented papers in national and international conferences and has conducted workshops on journalism and assistive technology. She has also delivered motivational speeches in colleges and corporate institutes.
Megan KirkwoodMegan Kirkwood is a Graduate from Edinburgh Napier University where she received a First Class Honours Degree in English Literature and Film. Since graduating, Megan has kept an academic film studies blog and won Highly Commended at the Global Undergraduate Awards in 2018. The paper submitted for that award has now been published in a peer-reviewed journal.
Sarah Kirpekar-SauerSarah Kirpekar-Sauer is a third-year student of a BA hons in English and Film at Edinburgh Napier University. Her interests include the history of queer fiction, urban spaces in literature, and post-colonial studies. She is currently working on original fiction projects.
Liam J. L. KnightLiam J. L. Knight is a third-year English Literature PhD student at the University of Birmingham. His research focuses on the manifestation of what we would today recognise as post-truth anxieties in the literary dystopias of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. He locates these anxieties in the ‘endotexts’ (additional fictional texts contained by works of fiction) of the dystopian genre and draws on theories of transtextuality, metafiction, and reader response to account for how post-truth functions in fictional worlds, and how fictional examples of post-truth can help readers to combat the intensified post-truth condition of the twenty-first century. He is a co-organiser of the ‘Pandemic Perspectives’ collective and can be found posting video essays, book reviews, and educational content on his YouTube channel, ‘DystopiaJunkie’.
Susanne KöllerSusanne Köller (she/her) is a lecturer with the literature arts and media department at University of Konstanz, where she is currently finishing her Ph.D. on narratively complex representations of the past in contemporary, original television drama. Her research interests include theories of seriality and complexity, historical fiction, time and temporalities, trauma, and their intersections. Susanne has previously published on cumulative effects on longform storytelling in Mad Men and ambiguously ‘difficult women’ in Westworld. She enjoys teaching primarily twentieth and twenty-first century narratives across media and anglophone cultures with a focus on television and serial texts. Say hello @s_koeller.
George KowalikGeorge Kowalik is a PhD candidate and Graduate Teaching Assistant at King’s College London, working on contemporary Anglo-American fiction and the distinction between 'postmodernism' and 'post-postmodernism' in the work of Percival Everett, Jonathan Franzen, Zadie Smith, and David Foster Wallace. He is a graduate of the University of Reading, Co-editor at King's English, Assistant Editor at Coastal Shelf, and a short fiction and culture writer. He can be found on Twitter at @kowalik_george.
Alex LatterAlex Latter teaches at Birkbeck College, where he has recently completed his PhD. He is currently co-editing a book of essays on Peter Riley for Gylphi’s Contemporary Writers Series.
Bianca LeggettBianca Leggett is a researcher and Visiting Lecturer in the English and Humanities department at Birkbeck and in Media and Performing Arts at Middlesex University. She is working on a monograph based on her doctoral research entitled Englishness Elsewhere: English Identity in the Contemporary Travel Novel.
Christine LehnenChristine Lehnen is a novelist and academic. Her research has been published in The Journal of Literary Theory and her short stories have been awarded the prizes of the Young Academies of Europe and the Ruhrfestspiele Recklinghausen. Since 2014, she has been teaching the Novel Writing Workshop at the University of Bonn. She has just completed her postgraduate degree of English Literatures and Cultures at the Universities of Bonn and Paris (III), and is finishing up a Master’s degree in Political Sciences. As C. E. Bernard and C. K. Williams, she publishes fantasy and suspense novels. She has studied in Paris, lived in the United States, Canada, Australia, and is currently based in Bonn.
Franca LeitnerFranca Leitner is a Master’s student in British and North American Cultural Studies at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität in Freiburg im Breisgau and has recently finished her Master’s thesis focusing on contemporary Irish crime fiction. She holds a B.Sc. in Psychology and a B.A. in English and History. Her research interests encompass ecocriticism, cultural memory studies and animal studies, mainly in the context of contemporary fiction.
Deborah LilleyDr Deborah Lilley completed her PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London working in the field of contemporary literature and theory. She has recently relocated to San Francisco from London and is working on a monograph based on her doctoral research entitled The New Pastoral in Contemporary British Writing.
Caroline MagennisCaroline Magennis teaches British literature, culture and history at Harlaxton College, a study abroad campus for US students. She is a graduate of Queen’s University, Belfast (BA, MA, PhD). She has held post-doctoral research fellowships at the Institute of Irish Studies at Queen’s and University College Dublin. Caroline publishes in the area of modern and contemporary Irish literature and culture, and is the author of Sons of Ulster: Masculinities in the Contemporary Northern Irish Novel and co-editor of Irish Masculinities: Reflections on Literature and Culture.
Churnjeet MahnDr Churnjeet Mahn is Lecturer in English at the University of Surrey. Her monograph, Travels in the Palimpsest: British Women's Travel to Greece 1840-1914, is forthcoming with Ashgate in 2012.
Xavier Marco Del PontDr Xavier Marcó Del Pont is currently Postdoctoral Visiting Research Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford. He completed his doctoral studies on narrative structure in the works of Thomas Pynchon at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has published work on Pynchon, American identity, and the graphic novel form; beyond Anglophone Literature, his research interests include Film Theory, Literature and Science, and post-1945 Literature.
Hannah MarcusHannah Marcus is an independent scholar having recently completed an MA in Cultural and Critical Studies at Birkbeck. Her work ranges from feminist technology theory to explorations of Jewish womanhood in media culture. She is also a commercial semiotician currently working for an Artificial Intelligence research start-up, where it has become necessary to define herself as a 'human' in relation to the machines she works with.
Richard MartinRichard Martin is a writer and lecturer based in London, who works at the intersections of film, art and architecture. He currently teaches at King’s College London, leads courses at Tate Modern, and writes for the Tate Research Department. He is the author of The Architecture of David Lynch (Bloomsbury, 2014), and his articles and reviews have appeared in the European Journal of American Culture, Journal of American Studies, Flow, Senses of Cinema, 49th Parallel,Critical Quarterly, The Berlin Review of Books and The Modernist. He completed his PhD at Birkbeck’s London Consortium, and has previously taught at Birkbeck and Middlesex University.
Craig McDonaldCraig McDonald is a third year PhD student at the University of Leeds. His thesis examines loneliness as it is represented in contemporary works of anglophone autofiction, with a particular focus on the works of Rachel Cusk, Ben Lerner, Tao Lin and David Foster Wallace. His wider research interests include contemporary American fiction, affect theory and postmodernism.
Ricarda MennRicarda Menn is a PhD Student and research assistant at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (KWI) in Essen. Her thesis examines serial autobiographies and autofictions in Contemporary Literature
Cathryn Josefina Merla-WatsonDr. Cathryn J. Merla-Watson is an Assistant Professor in the Literatures and Cultural Studies Department and affiliate faculty in Women and Gender Studies as well as Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas, Río Grande Valley. Currently, Dr. Merla-Watson is completing a book examining how queer, trans-American Latinx performances enact affective politics through re-imagining the gothic and the post/apocalyptic.
Antony MullenAntony Mullen is a Graduate Student in the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics at Newcastle University, and a Research Assistant in the Department for Quality in Learning and Teaching. He has previously published on childhood and trauma in film, film pedagogy, and contemporary fiction, and presented conference papers on similar topics. Antony is currently working on a chapter for an edited collection on Hard Times and Popular Culture, and an entry on the United Kingdom for the SAGE Encyclopaedia of War.
Jacob MurphyJacob Murphy holds an MA in 21st Century Literature from the University of Lincoln. His research interests include existentialism, martial arts, depictions of real and unreal spaces in literature, the literary mashup, post-apocalyptic and dystopian narratives and the videogame as a legitimate narrative form. Jacob is an alumnus member of the 21st Century Research Group at the University of Lincoln.
Ash OgdenAsh Ogden is a postgraduate student in the department of English Studies at Durham University. He is currently in the process of writing a dissertation on interactivity in experimental literature and videogames and is the television editor of The Bubble online magazine.
Sarah OliveDr Sarah Olive is Lecturer in English in Education at the University of York, where she is Programme Leader for the B.A. English in Education. She is editor of Teaching Shakespeare and a trustee of the British Shakespeare Association.
Laura op de BekeLaura op de Beke (www.lauraopdebeke.com) is a PhD fellow at the University of Oslo, Norway. Her work is part of a project called Lifetimes – A Natural History of the Present. Her contribution looks at Anthropocene temporalities in videogames, which manifest as temporal affects: for instance anxiety over the future, petro-melancholia, a preoccupation with death, failure and extinction, as well as technofuturistic hope. Her other interests include science fiction, green media studies, veganism, LARP, and the environmental humanities more broadly. Laura is also the founder and co-convenor of the online reading group un-earthed (www.un-earthed.group.com).
Holly ParkerHolly Parker is an Associate Lecturer and PhD researcher at the University of Lincoln. She has a book chapter on A Boy Made of Blocks in the edited collection Ready Reader One: The Stories we Tell About, With and Around Videogames, ed. by Mike Sell and Megan Amber Condis, under contract with Louisiana State University Press. She also works as a guest editor for Alluvium. Her current research focuses on affect and performance in twenty-first century fiction, forming an interdisciplinary study across affect theory and performance studies that rests on the cultural backdrop of neoliberalism and postmillennial digital culture.
Holly PesterHolly Pester is an AHRC-funded PhD student in the Contemporary Poetic Research Centre at Birkbeck, University of London. Holly teaches English on Birkbeck’s BA programme, and her first collection of poetry, Hoofs, has recently been released with if p then q press.
Emily PrattenEmily Pratten is a PhD student at the Centre for Digital Cultures at the University of Birmingham. Her doctoral work utilises feminist and critical theories to explore the ways in which misogyny manifests in online spaces and across digital cultures, and interrogates the social and economic conditions that, along with the communicative powers of the internet, have allowed gendered prejudices to transgress physical boundaries and further spread across contemporary Western culture. Her thesis interrogates male-dominated, antifeminist ideologies and argues that ‘extreme’ ideas about gender that exist in these spaces are very often reinforced and validated by traditional and commonly accepted cultural narratives about women.
Henry PriceHenry Price is a Research Fellow currently based in the Birmingham Business School (BBS) at the University of Birmingham. His PhD thesis was an examination on contemporary forms of antifeminism, using Incel as a case study to argue that, as feminist projects have become 'entangled' with their neoliberal environments, so too have antifeminist backlashes. He continues to be interested by and to write about the forging of sexual and political identities.
Paul Graham RavenDr. Paul Graham Raven is (at time of writing) a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow with the Department of Political Science at Lund University, where he studies and applies the narrative rhetorics of sociotechnical and climate imaginaries. His doctoral thesis proposed a novel model of sociotechnical change based on social practice theory, and a narrative prototyping methodology for infrastructure foresight. Paul is also an author and critic of science fiction, an occasional journalist and essayist, a collaborator with designers and artists, and a (gratefully) lapsed consulting critical futurist.
He currently lives in Malmö with a cat, some guitars, and sufficient books to constitute an insurance-invalidating fire hazard.
Dolores ResanoDolores Resano is a research fellow (FPU) at the Centre Dona i Literatura, Universitat de Barcelona, where she is currently completing her dissertation on 9/11 fiction and satire. Her research examines political and media rhetoric on 9/11 and their satirical contestation in literature. She is also the coordinator of the site for online reviews Lletra de Dona.
Meilanny RisamasuMeilanny Risamasu is a local pastor in Gereja Protestan di Indonesia bagian Barat (GPIB or Protestant Church in Western Part of Indonesia) for eighteen years. She currently studies in Jakarta Theological Seminary for her postgraduate program. Her research and thesis interests include Theology of Religions, Mission Theology, and Feminist Theology. She is a member in Department of Church, Society, and Religions in GPIB (Germasa Dept.) and also in Peruati (Persekutuan Perempuan Berpendidikan Teologi or Communion of Women Theologians in Indonesia).
Crystal Maritta SamCrystal (she/her) is a fourth year (part-time) PhD researcher at Kingston University, UK. She is currently writing a thesis on the role of memory in post 9/11 Muslim Women’s Writing. Her research interests include Memory studies, Postcolonial writing and South Asian novels. She is also heavily invested in the literature and films in her mother-tongue, Malayalam. She will be available at crystal.mangalathu@gmail.com
Christina ScholzChristina Scholz is currently writing her PhD thesis on M. John Harrison's Kefahuchi Tract trilogy. Her fields of interest include China Miéville's fiction, the further theorisation of Weird Fiction, Hauntology and the Gothic imagination, the interrelation of genre fiction and other forms of art, and depictions of war, violence and trauma in the arts. Her Master’s thesis, Thanateros: (De)Konstruktion von männlichen Heldenbildern im Mainstream-Film, has been published by AV Akademikerverlag in 2012. She is a regular reviewer for Strange Horizons.
Sofie SchreySofie Schrey is a PhD candidate in English and Creative Writing at Northumbria University, where she is part of the Environmental Humanities Research Group. She holds a BA and an MA in Applied Linguistics and a MA in Linguistics and Literature. Her research thus far has focused on nature and wilderness representations across written and visual mediums in 19th Century and Modern Literature. Her main research interests are Ecocriticism and Landscape Studies, with additional interests in Mythology, Gender Studies and Natural History. She is an active member of Arcadiana (EASLCE) and currently holds a three year mandate as an Assistant Editor for Ecozon@ Journal.
ORCHiD: 0000-0001-9267-7833
Kit SchusterKit Schuster (they/them) is a Master student in British and North American Cultural Studies at the University of Freiburg, Germany, where they will continue their studies with a PhD dissertation on trans speculative future fictions. Their current research focuses on bodies, gender, sexuality, and how these define (post)human identities in popular culture. Kit Schuster also works as a dance pedagogue, giving workshops on the interrelations of gender and movement. They can be contacted on twitter @KitSchusterAca.
Ben ScreechBen Screech is a Lecturer in English & Education at the University of Gloucestershire. His primary research interests are children’s & YA literature, although he has also published and presented on contemporary fiction more generally
Kristian ShawKristian Shaw is an AHRC-funded PhD student at Keele University. His research focuses on the transition from postmodern to cosmopolitan writing in late C20th and C21st transatlantic fiction, including an analysis of time and space in the works of Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon and David Mitchell. He completed his MPhil thesis at Durham University and is currently working towards a critical companion to the fiction of David Mitchell. He is an undergraduate tutor, freelance editor and book reviewer.
Katy ShawKaty Shaw is is Senior Lecturer and Subject Leader for English Literature at the University of Brighton. She is Director of C21: Centre for 21st-Century Writings and editor of C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-century Writings.
Iain Robert SmithDr Iain Robert Smith is Lecturer in Film Studies at King's College London. He is author of The Hollywood Meme: Transnational Adaptations in World Cinema (EUP, 2016) and co-editor of the collections Transnational Film Remakes (with Constantine Verevis, EUP, 2017) and Media Across Borders (with Andrea Esser and Miguel A. Bernal Merino, Routledge, 2016). He is co-chair of the SCMS Transnational Cinemas Scholarly Interest Group and co-investigator on the AHRC-funded research network Media Across Borders.
Sam SolnickSam Solnick recently completed his AHRC-funded PhD at Queen Mary, University of London, where he also teaches. He writes regularly for the Times Literary Supplement and is a contributing editor for the arts and politics quarterly The White Review.
Jacob SouleDr. Jacob Soule is a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in the English Department at Auburn University. In December 2019 he completed his PhD in the Program in Literature at Duke University. He is currently at work on a monograph titled The City Novel After the City: Planetary Metropolis, World Literature. He has an article on the historical novel in the current issue of Contemporary Literature, and has previously written for Polygraph, Keywords: A Journal of Cultural Materialism,Jacobin, The New Socialist, and the Verso Books Blog.
Daniel South (York)Dr. Daniel South holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of York, where his research focussed on contemporary novels’ treatments of (and contributions to) the public sphere in the internet age. He is an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and currently works for a widening participation charity in London.
Louise SquireLouise Squire is a doctoral candidate at the University of Surrey currently in her third year. Her thesis explores a strand of contemporary environmental crisis fiction that draws links between the emergence of environmental crisis and the human fear of death.
Adam StockDr Adam Stock completed his PhD, Mid-Twentieth Century Dystopian Fiction and Political Thought, in December 2011. He teaches in the English Studies department at Durham University and writes on apocalypse, dystopia, and the relationship between visual arts and literature.
Nicholas StockNicholas Stock is a postgraduate researcher in philosophy of education at University of Birmingham and a lecturer of English Literature in a sixth form college. He is interested in ironic approaches to education, particularly those that embrace literature, poststructuralism and post-Nietzschean ontology.
Rachel SykesRachel Sykes is a Lecturer in Contemporary American Literature at the University of Birmingham. Her research and teaching focuses on three areas: 1) sound studies and aesthetics of quiet and loud in American culture, 2) memoir and contemporary life-writing, and 3) digital and popular cultures.
Rhys TrimbleDr. Rhys Trimble is a bilingual poet, text artist, performer, drummer, editor, critic, collaborator, shaman, staff-wielder and shoutyman based in Wales. The author of more than a dozen books, including his latest, Swansea Automatic, he is interested in avant-garde poetry and Welsh metrics. He edits ctrl+alt-del e-zine. He has performed in countries around the world and his work has been translated into Slovak, Polish, Latvian and Turkish.
Elsie UnsworthElsie Unsworth (they/them) is a graduate of MA Literature and Culture at the University of Salford, Manchester. They have an interest in culture and philosophy in literature, specifically in the context of speculative fiction, fantasy, folk and mythology. Their dissertation and current research focus on 21st century Irish folklore, (post)nationalism, Irish Traveller communities, and feminist and queer folklore. They are currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Salford, and continuing to engage in creative writing in the field of speculative, fantasy and folk.
Neil VallellyDr Neil Vallelly is a former Commonwealth Scholar (2012-2015) at the University of Otago in conjunction with Shakespeare's Globe. His research and publications focus on phenomenology, particularly through the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. He is also interested in theories of space, place, and perception. He formerly studied at Queen's University Belfast and is presently based in Dunedin, New Zealand.
Christopher VardyChristopher Vardy is studying for a PhD at the University of Manchester that explores contemporary figurations of neoliberalism, the ‘End of History’ and the 1980s. He has published an article on sexuality, space and radical politics in American fiction of the 1990s, and has contributed a chapter on nostalgia and retro in David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green to the upcoming Twenty First Century British Fiction edited collection.
Tony VeneziaDr Tony Venezia recently completed a PhD on Alan Moore and the historical imagination at Birkbeck, University of London. He is a visiting lecturer teaching English and film at Birkbeck and Middlesex University and has published articles and reviews in a number of academic journals, including Peer English, Radical Philosophy, New Formations, and Visual Culture in Britain.
Diana WagnerDiana Wagner is currently writing her PhD thesis on Siri Hustvedt at the Philipps University of Marburg, Germany. Her field of interests includes the relationship between fiction and the visual arts, intermediality, questions of perception, vision, and gender, transdisciplinary approaches to literature.
Lewis WardDr Lewis Ward has taught modern and contemporary literature at the University of Exeter, the University of Plymouth and the University of the West of England. He is currently working on a book provisionally titled Voices of Empathy in Contemporary Narratives of War, Genocide and Exile, which will investigate intersections between ethics and narrative voice in recent transnational fiction.
Alyssa WhitingAlyssa Whiting completed an MA in Modern Literature at Mary Immaculate College, Ireland and a BA in Art History at Utah Valley University, United States. Alyssa is intrigued by iterations of the Internet in contemporary literature and how this topic intersects with narrative and identity.
Kate WilkinsonKate Wilkinson is a Teaching Associate in the School of English and Drama, Queen Mary University of London. She has recently completed her PhD on the persistence of letters in contemporary novels.
Mark P. WilliamsDr Mark P. Williams is currently a Teaching Fellow at Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, Germany, where he has worked since 2014. He previously taught at the University of East Anglia (UK) and Victoria University of Wellington (Aotearoa New Zealand), and has also been a political reporter for Scoop Independent Media in the NZ Parliamentary Press Gallery. His PhD, Radical Fantasy: A Study of Left Radical Politics in the Fantasy Writing of Michael Moorcock, Angela Carter, Alan Moore, Grant Morrison and China Miéville, was awarded from the University of East Anglia.
Denise WongDenise Wong is a PhD candidate and Teaching Associate at Queen Mary University of London. Her doctoral research explores temporality and affect in contemporary second-person narratives.
Heidi YeandleDr Heidi Yeandle is based at Swansea University and is currently working on her first monograph, Angela Carter and Western Philosophy. Her research on Carter has been published in Contemporary Women's Writing and Imagining the End: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Apocalypse. She has a forthcoming chapter on Carter and Claude Levi-Strauss in Marie Mulvey-Roberts' edited collection The Arts of Angela Carter: A Multidisciplinary Kaleidoscope, which is due to be published in Manchester University Press in 2017.