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Research Menu

Summary of Staff Research Interests

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  Jenn Ashworth

  My main areas of interest are long prose fiction and the short story. My recent work has concentrated on the unreliable or limited narrator and on LDS fiction. I am currently working on a piece of long fiction in the first person omnicient point of view that engages with ideas about healing, transformation, haunting and masculinity.
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  Polly Atkin

  Romantic Literature and Romantics Legacies; Poetry and Place; Ecopoietics; Tourism and Heritage Studies; Literary Tourism; Lake District tourism and literature; Regional Culture; Poetry and Embodiment; Contemporary Writing; Creative Writing.  I'm particularly interested in interdisciplinary work which combines sociological research with literary criticism. 
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  Brian Baker

  I am currently researching in masculinities and contemporary film towards a monograph with Bloomsbury Academic. In 2014 I will also be writing a book on the history of science fiction in the 1960s, which will extend work already completed on New Wave science fiction and literary experimentation. I am also pursuing new developments in critical/creative practice.
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  Sally Bushell

  My larger research interests are in the field of British Romanticism with a particular interest in Wordsworth and the Lake District as well as in the form of the long poem and in critical exploration of poetic process.  I am interested in interpreting the text in all its states (visual, material and verbal).  My current research is on literary cartography and the mapping and reading of literary works for which a map appears alongside the text. 
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  Jo Carruthers

  My main areas of interest are in the Bible and literature, Englishness, and literary geographies. My most recent work is on Englishness and simplicity. I am also interested in the workings of ritual and place in religious and national identities (especially in relation to the Jewish festival Purim). Carrying on work already done on the biblical Book of Esther I am also working on a book on female biblical figures in Victorian literature.
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  Jane Draycott

  My principal areas of practical research are in poetry and poetic translation, poetic sound-montage and the short story. I have been interested in the connections between medieval dream narratives and the jump-cut and dramatic effects of some modernist poetry - my current new work 'After Awater' takes its lead from the long 1934 poem 'Awater' by Dutch poet Martinus Nijhoff. I am also currently completing translations of some of the 1930s poems of Henri Michaux.  
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  Kamilla Elliott

  My research interests revolve around visual and verbal media and their intersemiotic, interdisciplinary, interhistorical, and intercultural relations. I have a particular interest in relations between literature and film and am currently investigating the troubled relations between adaptation studies and mainstream humanities theories in a project entitled Theorizing Adaptations/Adapting Theories. I have further interests in literature and culture of the long nineteenth century, especially the rise of picture identification. I am working on a sequel to Portraiture and British Gothic Fiction: The Rise of Picture Identification, 1764-1835 (Johns Hopkins 2012) that continues that research to 1918.
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  Alison Findlay

  My main research interests are in early modern drama and women's writing of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
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  George Green

  I am primarily interested in Irish Literature, any aspect of Myth, the Western novel and history, and novels of the Spanish Civil War
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  Zoe Lambert

  My research in creative writing is in short fiction and short stories, as well as linked short story collections, novels in stories and composite novels. I am also interested in war writing and trauma. My current creative research is in the novel and disability, as well as merging genre(s) and literary fiction. 
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  Lynne Pearce

  My research falls broadly in the field of literary and cultural theory with a particular interest in feminist and gender studies, women's writing, romance studies, and most recently mobillities studies (my new project is a book on 'Automobility and the Phenomenology of Driving'. Between 2006-2010 I was PI for the AHRC-funded research project 'Moving Manchester'.
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  John Schad

  My main areas of research are: critical-creative writing; post-criticism; Modernism; Victorian writing; literary theory; and the relationship between religion and literature.
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  Tony Sharpe

  My research interests are in modern and contemporary English and American writing, with a particular but not exclusive interest in poetry.  Most of my books have focused on poetry (Eliot, Stevens, Auden), and my most recent has been an edited collection of essays about Auden from Cambridge University Press (2013).  My current research continues these interests, including work on Auden and Stevens as well as on more contemporary writers, and at a broader level connects with areas such as: writing and landscape (or place); writing and the religious impulse; writing and seeing (including the extension beyond textual into visual), and critical creativity.
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  Catherine Spooner

  Catherine Spooner specialises in Gothic literature and culture from the nineteenth century to the present. Her first book, Fashioning Gothic Bodies, examined the relationship between Gothic literature and dress from the French Revolution to Goth subculture. This was followed by Contemporary Gothic, an exploration of contemporary uses of Gothic in literature, film, television, fashion, art and consumer culture. She is currently working on an AHRC-funded research project entitled Post-Millennial Gothic: Comedy, Romance and the Rise of Happy Gothic, to be published by Continuum in 2013.