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Profiles of Current and Recent English Literature PhD Students

Nicola Bishop

I am currently in my third year of an interdisciplinary PhD focusing on the characterisation of male lower-middle-class clerks in late-Victorian and Edwardian fiction. My thesis is based around the stereotyping of office workers as pathetic, pitiable figures, particularly in works that have long been ignored by the literary canon. I am involved in the AHRC middle-brow fiction network and especially enjoy browsing second-hand bookshops for little-known treasures. I am jointly supervised, in two departments, by Professor John Schad (English) and Dr. James Taylor (History). I currently teach in the History department on their new Part 1 course - From the Medieval to the Modern: History and Historians. I also recently gave a paper at Lancaster University’s 2010 Histfest conference titled “What thought of ‘head office’ to one off his head?: The Lower-Middle-Class Clerk on Holiday, 1850-1930’.

Zoe Bolton

I have completed my PhD on eighteenth-century and Romantic texts written during travel. My thesis was entitled 'Writing Travel: Textuality and the Experience of Place from Gray to Byron' and it examined the relationship between travel, textual form and the compositional process. My project was jointly supervised by Dr Sally Bushell and Professor Simon Bainbridge, and was funded by the AHRC. I am also interested in literary mapping and recently worked on the British Academy funded digital project 'Mapping the Lakes: A Literary GIS'.

Zoe graduated in 2010.

Kym Brindle

Until recently, I was a full time PhD student in English literature, and the title of my thesis was “Epistolary Encounters: Pastiche in Postmodern Victorian Fiction”. My study was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and I was supervised by Kamilla Elliott and Sally Bushell.

My research examined the significance of fictional letters and diaries in postmodern-Victorian fiction. Epistolary voice actively revisions neo-Victorian fiction’s favoured marginal, unrepresented, rejected, or ‘other’ figures. Intercalated documents appear to be agents of the flaunted narrative discontinuity and multiple points of view that critics claim the genre is based upon. I investigated how framing text as documents fashions a pastiche structure and questioned if this evidenced a postmodern pledge to provide a decentred view of history.

My study was grounded in theories of parody and pastiche and built on Linda Hutcheon’s work on historiographic metafiction. It was also informed by the work of M. M. Bakhtin, whose discussion of heteroglossia coincides with theories of diary form’s dialogic double-voicedness. Neo-Victorian fiction is a complex weave of double-codings, beginning with a fundamental duality as contemporary writers revisit the nineteenth century. I investigated how writers move beyond this to, in fact, triple-code their novels with the addition of epistolary codes. These evoke ideas of privacy, confession, secrecy, seduction, and sincerity, only to be exploited and subverted as writers manipulate the form. I argued that writers who triple-code their fiction in this manner do so in ways that integrate a form of meta-critical discourse, which may problematise or forestall theoretical analysis of the texts themselves.

I have taught across a range of subjects: Victorian Literature, American Women’s Fiction, Crime Fiction, Twentieth-Century Gothic, Looking at London, Make It New: Modernism and Flights from Realism: British Postmodern Fiction.

The conference papers I have delivered include ‘Authenticity and Author[ity] in Contemporary American Fiction’ (Edge Hill, 2007), ‘Epistolary in Sarah Waters’s Affinity’ (UCL, 2008), ‘Epistolary Geometry in Sarah Waters’s Affinity (University of Lampeter, 2008), ‘Open me carefully and tell it slant: Letters and the Victorian Body in A.S. Byatt’s Possession’  (Oxford University, 2008), ‘A Dissenting Diarist: Mick Jackson’s The Underground Man’ (Edge Hill, 2009), ‘A Dissident Diarist: The Superfluous Other in Mick Jackson’s The Underground Man’ (Chester University 2009), ‘A Deviant Device: Diary Dissembling in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace’ (Newcastle University, 2009), and ‘Lewis Carroll and the Curious Theatre of Modern Monstrosity’ (Lancaster University, 2009). I have published ‘Authenticity and Author[ity] in Contemporary American Fiction’, 21: Journal of Contemporary and Innovative Fiction, Issue 1: 2008-09.

Kym graduated in 2011.

Steve Curtis

I completed my undergraduate degree at Bangor University back in 2000 and then took some time away from the academic world whilst my wife was studying. Her studies led us to Lancaster and in 2003/2004 I carried out the MA in Shakespeare and Cultural Theory. My MA thesis was an investigation into Shakespeare’s representation of ghosts, particularly in connection to contemporary ideas of Purgatory and demonology. I began my Phd research in 2005 and have been working part-time since then. I have always found the department to be an enjoyable and intellectually stimulating place in which to carry out research, with helpful and friendly academic and administrative staff. I look after my toddler daughter alongside my research and the department has always been supportive in the pastoral issues that inevitably arise from juggling family and academic commitments.

My Phd thesis is provisionally titled ‘Blood on the Early Modern Stage’, and is an attempt to survey and account for the ubiquity of ‘the noblest humour’ in tragic drama written 1570-1642. My work is influenced by performance, body studies, anthropology, and literary theory but is broadly New Historicist. I investigate a range of early modern plays alongside various contemporary texts, literary and otherwise, in order to establish what blood meant, and what it meant to bleed, during the period in question. Part of this involves the unpacking of moments of violence into what I have labelled ‘the blood that is shed, the blood that is said, and the blood that is read’. The combination here of material, discursive, and interpretative engagements with blood creates the experience of bloodshed in drama, and, by extension, in early modern culture. I argue that the very notion of subjectivity, so often traced to this historical moment, is inextricably tied up in our relationship to blood. Discourses of sacrifice, performativity, humoralism, and the beginnings of modern medicine are all concerned with attempts to define and control the blood that is always tenuously contained within the body. These different attempts can be read as alienating discourses, by which lived experience is supplanted by expertise, culminating in the dominance of learned medicine today.

My other research interests include contemporary Gothic and horror, the impact of digitalisation on literature and humanity, and the rise and fall of interest in Shakespeare’s contemporaries. I have delivered various conference papers on areas ranging from medieval drama’s depictions of sacrifice to the threat of our usurpation by digital memory in Doctor Who, and have taught both 1st and 3rd year undergraduates whilst at Lancaster.

Malgorzata Drewniok

My supervisors are Elena Semino (Linguistics) and Catherine Spooner (English), and the working title of my thesis is “Language characterisation of Buffy (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) as a Gothic heroine”.

My PhD is interdisciplinary and so are my research interests, mainly stylistic analysis, literary analysis, film/TV studies and the study of popular culture. My research focuses on the language of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, with special reference to the characterisation of its protagonist, Buffy Summers. I’m also looking at how the language of the series contributes to its Gothic character.

The idea of the topic stemmed from my personal interests. Having interdisciplinary BA and MA degrees (BA English Studies and MA in English Language and Contemporary Literary Studies) I’ve always wanted not only to combine my linguistic and literary interests, but also to include popular culture studies in my research. Stylistics is my starting point – with a BA dissertation on the proper names of fictional characters in Chronicles of Narnia and an MA one on episode titles in Charmed TV series – but I want to explore various directions.

In July 2009 I attended and helped out with The International Gothic Association Conference held at Lancaster University (21-24 July 2009), for more details on the conference please see http://www.monstrous-media.com/

I’m a qualified EFL teacher and have already gained some significant experience. After finishing my MA I taught English in Spain (academic year 2007/2008). In summer 2008 I taught in pre-sessional EAP course at another university, which I will do again in summer 2009.

Eleanor Fitton

I am currently in the second year of research in the Department of English and Creative Writing, on the department's English PhD program. The 'broad topic' for my PhD is the history of sexuality; by which is meant something quite different from what has regularly been meant in many other academic studies. As such my research seeks, in a small but nonetheless fundamental way, to go 'beyond' the work of scholars such as Michel Foucault and Judith Butler on 'sexuality', while at the same time asking what it is that has consistently, and essentially, prevented such seminal work from reaching the grounds necessary for a more elementary enquiry.

In terms of 'materials', my thesis takes, as its base, not only 'texts' but also physical art and music. For this research, the British Library, The Beazley Archive at Oxford, and National Library of Scotland have already been of great help, and I hope in 2011 and 2012 to make use of other specific archives based in and around the UK and USA. I am also currently in the process of learning ancient Greek, a necessary step for the most elementary aspects of the research. In 2011-12 there are strong hopes for a scheduled period of research-leave with the British School at Athens. My supervisor and general confidante for the entire endeavor is, as ever, Professor Lynne Pearce.

Gemma Gaskell

I have now completed my PhD, which was centred on Victorian religion in the works of Lewis Carroll. My thesis examined the ways in which, in response to so-called Victorian 'crisis of faith', Carroll constructs for himself a new belief system, drawn from a variety of different religious sources. He demonstrates a kind of religious eclecticism which is more radical than he is sometimes given credit for. The thesis seeks to link Carroll with modified Christian orthodoxies, Spiritualism and Psychical Research, Eastern Theosophy and elements of Judaism and Kabbalism. My work was supervised by Professor John Schad.

My BA, MA and the beginning of my PhD research were undertaken at Loughborough University where I also taught on a number of first-year Undergraduate modules and on the final-year Children's Literature module. I co-organised a Postgraduate interdisciplinary conference at Loughborough in 2006 called 'Boundaries'; and co-edited a collection of essays influenced by the conference, published in 2007.

Gemma graduated in 2010

Rachel Holland

I am a first year PhD student with research interests in contemporary fiction and theory. My thesis is shaping up to involve a study of the relationships between literature, science and subjectivity, with a particular focus on novels that engage with scientific ideas as a way of understanding the world. I am interested in the history of dialogue and debate between what has traditionally been termed the ‘two cultures’ of science and the humanities, and the ways in which this dynamic continues to evolve in contemporary culture. I will be considering the extent to which it is relevant to discuss the work of writers such as Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, David Lodge, Scarlett Thomas, Michel Houellebecq, Italo Calvino and Richard Powers in terms of participation in an emergent ‘third culture’, in which traditional boundaries between art and science are tested.

I studied for both my BA and MA at Lancaster, and am delighted to be continuing my research, under the supervision of Dr. Michael Greaney, in this diverse and immensely supportive department.

Aroosa Kanwal

I am a final year PhD student under the supervision of Dr. Lindsey Moore. The working title of my thesis is "Homeland through Diasporic Eyes: A Study of Fiction of Pakistani Expatriate Writers". My PhD study focuses on diasporic representations of ancestral homeland and problematic of identitarian affiliation in the works of Pakistani expatriate and British Asian writers. Massive migrations, dislocations and displacements - commonly summed up under the umbrella of diaspora - have compelled scholars to rethink the concepts of nationalism and national identity particularly with regard to transmigrants who subvert the notion of linear migration making it possible to expand and reconstruct identities via what one might describe as rerouting roots. James Clifford's definition of diasporic subjects as 'bearers of discrepant temporalities that trouble the linear, progressive narratives of the nation-state and global modernization' will form the basis of my enquiry in this project. In light of these paradigms, I will discuss notions of cultural identity and the construction of home in the works of Pakistani Expatriate writers.

Andrew King

I began my PhD in Lancaster in October 2008 under the supervision of Sally Bushell, and my provisional title is “Spatial Theory and British Romantic Poetry”. My thesis is an investigation into the importance of place and space in the poetry of the Romantic period with a particular emphasis on the emerging concept of the national museum at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The project draws on contemporary spatial theory in order to conceptualise the relationship between place and poetry. Alongside my PhD I also teach on English 100.

I also did my undergraduate work at Lancaster, graduating with a 1st-class Honours degree in 2007, and I gained a Distinction in the Lancaster MA in Romantic and Victorian Literature in 2008.

George Murgatroyd

Having completed my BA further afield, I returned to Lancaster, my hometown, in 2006 to study for my Research MA. From the off I found the Department of English and Creative Writing to be an incredibly friendly place in which to work, so much so that once I had finished my MA I applied to stay on and study for a Ph.D . One of the best things about the Department is that the administrative and academic staff are always happy to help out or just have a chat, however busy they are, which makes for a very open and welcoming environment. I have been given a great deal of support and advice throughout my time at Lancaster from many members of staff, but have also, importantly, had the freedom to shape and direct my own research.

My Ph.D thesis essentially analyses the depiction of race in fictional work emanating from New York from 1914 until 1929 and the intra and interracial literary relationships that the authors of this work had with each other. The archival focus of my research has taken me to various libraries in America during the past two years - including those of Princeton, Yale and Chicago - and I will be travelling to the University of Pennsylvania next year to conclude the archival research of my Ph.D. All in all I’m having a fabulous time as a Ph.D student at Lancaster and, having been made to feel like a member of the Departmental team, I am sure that any one joining the Department would experience the same sense of amiability and encouragement.

Alex Paknadel

My thesis was concerned with the protean nature of nostalgia in the novels of J.G. Ballard and Douglas Coupland. Although these authors’ approaches to this complex feeling differ greatly, their mutual suspicion of it places them in dialogue with one another in fascinating ways. Both authors, I proposed, are engaged in an attempt to penetrate the nostalgic gauze preventing them from seeing the truth behind an accelerated western culture whose anxieties have sent many scurrying into largely fictional “simpler times.” However, the “truth” they and their protagonists uncover is often equally nostalgic. It was my contention that nostalgia and homesickness are inescapable, even (and in some cases especially) when there is a concerted effort to forget.

After completing my PhD, I intend to conduct post-doctoral research into contemporary horror films and national identity. I will be interrogating the films of Richard Stanley (South Africa), Guillermo Del Toro (Mexico), Michele Soavi (Italy) and David Cronenberg (Canada) for this purpose. My one claim to fame is that Del Toro himself gave me his blessing for this project.

Alex graduated in 2011.

Lucy Perry

I am a final year PhD student, and my thesis is on representations of senescence in contemporary Anglophone literature. I set the boundaries between 1955 with the first translation of Samuel Beckett’s Molloy into English, and 2010 which marks the publication of the most recent Alzheimer’s narrative, Samantha Harvey’s The Wilderness. My overarching focus is on the West’s ‘trans-’, ‘anti-’, and ‘post-’ -marked discourses of ageing, which include: ancient Greek and Roman medical/proverbial texts that latently de-naturalize senescence; Alois Alzheimer’s research which recast the cognitive/intellectual involution of the aged formerly accepted as natural as pathological, and hence something to be cured or overcome; the aesthetic deferral of old age through cosmetic surgery, and physiologically through body modification; the ubiquitous axiom ‘anti-ageing’; the ostracism of the economically inactive elderly and evasive verbal habits in western culture; the pathologization of old age in medicine and the ensuing shift in the medical vocabulary of ageing (i.e. the epidemiological transition); and the rejection of deterministic, essentialist conceptions of the body in trans- and posthuman philosophy.

My key interest in all of these is the representation of old age as not in contrast to youth but a possible state of youth. My main question in this thesis in relation to this is: how does the gradual cultural disinvention of old age, and the problematization of young/old binaries, affect how we textualize old age in contemporary literature? I have particular interest in the dialogue between literature and medicine in the representation of ageing, and so underpinning this thesis is a focus on how far the reification of ‘anti-ageing’ ideologies through medicine and medical technology elicit changes in the language and symbolism authors employ in fictional representations of ageing.

Freyja Peters

I completed my BA here at Lancaster in 2003, so to come back for my PhD has been something of a homecoming (although it still feels surreal having supervisions in the old County halls of residence!). In between I did my MA at Manchester, and still live in the city, thus alternating between rain + concrete and rain + hills.

My PhD work, supervised by Brian Baker, is focussed upon an exploration of identity as portrayed in a selection of contemporary graphic novels, including Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor series and Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese. Particularly, I am interested in depictions of masculinity in these works, and also the representation of physical and other spaces, both experienced and self-created, and furthermore considering these in relation to the unique form and composition of the graphic novel medium.

In July I will be presenting a paper at the conference Identity and Form in 20th and 21st Century Literature, being held at Sheffield Hallam University (plenary speakers Prof. Thomas Docherty & Prof. Stuart Murray). I am currently co-organising a conference to be held at Lancaster in June 2010. Planning is at a fairly early stage, but I and my co-organisers, Chloe and Gosia, hope to make the conference as inclusive – and enticing! – as possible, so please do get in touch if you would like to get involved. I am also collaborating on establishing a postgraduate journal for the department so, again, please get in touch if you are interested in assisting with this project.

In my spare time I like watching HBO series (Sex & the City excepted) and dead intellectual cinema (as well as high quality fare such as Charlie’s Angels and Fantastic Four 2: Rise of the Silver Surfer), hiking (hills), cycling (flat places), daydreaming about founding a self-sufficient commune in France, being enraged by idiots (often, but not exclusively, on the Guardian’s Comment is Free website), and drinking hot Ribena. I’ve also just started a book group with a friend, because I don’t read enough.

Amy Prodromou

The working title of my thesis was "'That Weeping Constellation': Narratives of Loss and Recovery in Contemporary Women's Writing."

'How does one honour, in grief, all that up-rises? And how then does one write of it?'  -- Gail Jones ('Without Stars')

Although memoir uniquely satisfies "a desire to assert agency and subjectivity after several decades of insisting loudly on the fragmentation of identity and the death of the author" (Miller 12), it has often taken a backseat to autobiography studies within lifewriting criticism. As Helen Buss suggests, "[t]he study of memoirs from a theoretical and critical perspective informed by scholarly research is now overdue" (7-8).

I proposed that the grief memoir—only recently advocated as a genre in its own right by Kathleen Fowler—fills a gap left by the professional literature of bereavement and itself contributes to "that weeping constellation" (Jones 147) or community of mourners missing from contemporary grief practices as identified by Sandra Gilbert in Death's Door (2006) and Darian Leader in The New Black (2008). If, as Gilbert believes, we are at "a historical moment when death [is] in some sense unspeakable and grief—or anyway the expression of grief—[is] at best an embarrassment, at worst a social solecism or scandal" (xix), then the grief memoir can contribute to what Leader calls a much-needed "dialogue of mournings" (85) and shed new light on how we navigate loss.

What sets my chosen texts apart is the performance of complex "recovered" selves that show how "recovery," ambiguous and shifting in nature, calls for more complicated theories of mourning able to accommodate an understanding of grief not in terms of Freud's absolute recovery nor Tennyson's "loss forever new" (Laura Tanner), but rather, a space located somewhere in between.

I have given numerous conference papers, most recently "'Memoirs of Textured Recovery':Navigating Loss in Women's Contemporary Memoir" at Founding Conference IABA Europe "Life Writing in Europe" (VU University, Amsterdam, 29-31 October 2009); "'No Bones Broken': (Dis)Embodiment and Recovery in Jenny Diski's Skating To Antarctica" at "Writing Bodies/Reading Bodies in Contemporary Women's Writing" (Postgraduate Contemporary Women's Writing Network, Oxford University, Sept. 2009); and a short story, "Girl Flights," at "Glocal Imaginaries" (Lancaster Univeristy, Sept. 2009). I'm currently working on a novel, sections of which have been published in journals including: Cadences: A Journal of Literature and the Arts in Cyprus, EAPSU: An Online Journal of Critical and Creative Writing, and most recently in R.KV.R.Y Literary Journal and Blood Lotus: An Online Literary Journal.

Amy graduated in 2011.

Amy Pugh

I am a third year English Literature PhD student, researching ecofeminist approaches to British women’s writings of the Romantic era. I am interested in new and relevant ways of addressing women’s treatment of nature and (gendered) environmental issues in the eighteenth-century, as well as evaluating ecological feminism as a useful literary theory. My current focus is on literary and non-fiction engagements with botany and gardens, explored within the works of writers such as Charlotte Smith. The interdisciplinary nature of my project allows me to consider materials from literature, sociology and natural sciences, so my research is definitely keeping me on my toes.

Originally from West Yorkshire, I crossed the border to study my BA at Lancaster in 2004 and haven’t looked back since! I have been particularly fascinated with Romantic writings (especially poetry) for around a decade now, and have found Lancaster University to be the perfect institution at which to pursue this interest. With the university’s proximity to the Lake District, and the strength of the academic department in this field, I have had no qualms about remaining here to study first for my MA (in Romantic and Victorian Literature) and now my PhD, supervised by Simon Bainbridge and Lynne Pearce. The department offers an extremely friendly and encouraging environment, and the support from academic staff, administrative staff, and my postgraduate peers has been wonderful.

Xavier Aldana Reyes

Lancaster is quickly becoming the place to be for anyone with a serious interest in the field of Gothic literature, cinema and culture. It is also one of the few places in the country where Contemporary Gothic is taught and researched, and with such renowned scholars in the field as Catherine Spooner or Fred Botting and at least another five knowledgeable PhD students working on similar projects, it is not hard to see why Lancaster University feels like home to me. My own PhD project centres on notions of pain and suffering at aesthetic and affective levels and offers a wide exploration of the rise of bodily transgression in Contemporary Gothic.

My Phd will (hopefully) include extensive discussions on writers like Chuck Palahniuk, Bret Easton Ellis, Clive Barker or Poppy Z. Brite, but will also leave some space for the analysis of other recent cultural products like the Saw and Hostel film franchises and violent video games like Manhunt.

The first thing that drew me to Lancaster was the sincere warmth and understanding with which such a ‘transgressive’ PhD proposal was received, and my supervisor has been an immense source of support for me. Since my first prospective e-mail I have discovered other things that have reassured me that this is indeed the right place to undertake my PhD. Some examples are the extensive library collection, or the very interesting postgraduate societies that I have joined and that keep me intellectually stimulated outside of my research. What I find extremely engaging about working in and for the English Department is that the barrier between ‘time to work’ and ‘time for leisure’ is extremely thin and that I am learning in more ways than one.'

Jacqueline Wilkinson

. The theme of my thesis was ‘Thomas Hardy and the Carnivalesque’ which involves an examination of Hardy’s use of such carnivalesque concepts as the choric element, the Wild Man, Devils, the ‘woman on top’, masking, music, feasts and the grotesque, all of which require an in-depth knowledge of both folk culture and socio-historical and socio-anthropological approaches to carnival. The thesis required an examination and application of the carnivalesque the theories of scholars such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Phythian-Adams, Peter Burke, David Gilmore, Natalie Zemon Davis, Barbara Babcock and Terry Castle among others.

My previous background is in teaching and Children’s and Youth Theatre. After gaining my teaching certificate from Edge Hill Training College in 1960 I taught English Language and Literature in secondary education, and after studying at The Central School of Speech and Drama in London (1965-66) I became involved in the Hampshire Children's Theatre and Basingstoke Youth Theatre. I retired from teaching on health grounds in 1990 but decided to pursue my studies as a means of pain management, thus in 2003 I gained my BA 1st Class Honours in Humanities with the OU, and then gained my MA with them in 2005. I am a member of The Thomas Hardy Association and submitted an article to their journal on ‘The Carnivalesque and the Grotesque in Far from the Madding Crowd’ in 2006.

I chose to take my M Phil/PhD at Lancaster on dual grounds, firstly because of the outstanding reputation of the English and Creative Writing Department and secondly because of wheelchair accessibility and a strong Student Support team. I commenced my M Phil/PhD under the supervision of Dr Tess Cosslett in April 2007. I enjoyed the work ethic which predominates at Lancaster but also the way in which I was made to feel a part of a lively and welcoming department. As a mature student,, I enjoyed Lancaster because when there I felt the same age as other students mainly because I am behind my face and therefore only saw myself reflected in their young faces, thus I become a 24-6 year old with visual and mobility problems. My main issue is what to do next – all ideas (constructive ideas) would be welcome!

Jacqueline graduated in 2010.

Kim Wiltshire

After graduating from an MA in Creative Writing at Manchestser Metropolitan University in 2003, where I started writing my first novel, I felt that there was something missing academically in my writing. I wanted to explore issues around gender, and through discussion with my supervisors I have developed a study in contemporary texts exploring the use of the interim form of masculinity that I am terming 'the Loser'. Using a mixture of theory and creativity, I am forming a picture of early millennium masculinity in Western society.

Work outside Lancaster University includes: several pieces of short fiction published in magazines and short story anthologies ; commissions from Burnley Youth Theatre (to write two plays for young people, with 'Polarised' recently being adapted into film for schools) and Activ8 at Bolton Octagon Theatre; Community Art work in Manchester around diversity and health issues, and work as Community Arts Project Manager for Lime Arts and Health;  scriptwriting for internet TV station 'Lets Go Global'. In 2008 I was one of six writers mentored by Charlotte Keatley through North West Playwrights to write my first full length stage play, Joy With Child. This play has had two showcases to date, and I am currently working on my second play, Manchester Calling. I am a Creative Writing lecturer in the Department of Contemporary Arts at MMU Cheshire and also for the Open University, and I throughout 2009 and 2010 I will be the writer on the Transitions Cystic Fibrosis project at Lime Arts and Health, funded by Children in Need. 

Kim graduated in 2010.

Chris Witter

My research explores American short fiction, during the 1960s and 70s, focused around conceptions of experimentation, metafiction, and modernism. My aim is to reformulate current understanding of the works of this period; to historicise and politicise the textual practice of authors such as Donald Barthelme, William H. Gass, Walter Abish, Stanley Elkin, Thomas Pynchon and Robert Coover. I am currently writing two short pieces: the first explores reoccurring sexual metaphors in Gass’ In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife. The second piece considers Donald Barthelme’s textual engagement with critical and artistic theories of la vie quotidienne, and I hope to deliver this as a conference paper in early 2010.

I completed my BA in English Literature at Lancaster University, where I took advantage of two full modules in American literature, spanning from Columbus to Coupland. I’m pleased to see these modules still run roughly as I took them. I moved to the University of Nottingham to complete an MA in English Literature, feeling that it was necessary to experience a different institution and a different city. I’ve returned to Lancaster for the PhD, which I have just begun. My research is supervised by Dr Brian Baker, for which I am duly thankful. I have been awarded AHRC funding, and I am a member of the British Association for American Studies (BAAS). I have just begun to work with a small team of fellow postgraduate students on a Lancaster University postgraduate journal, which is called Luminary. I was born in Watford, and raised on brown bread in the flat lands of Peterborough. University was a welcome escape.