Our Staff

Core staff

Director:  Dr Jason Edwards 

Convenor of the MA in Culture and Thought after 1945:  Dr Claire Westall  

Administrator:  Helen Jacobs

Teaching staff

(with home department and research interests)

Henrice Altink (History)

  • Racial inequalities in the British Caribbean.

Jo Applin (History of Art) 

  • American and European art since 1945, with a particular focus on the 1960s and contemporary international art.

David Attwell (English and Related Literature)

  • Postcolonial theory, critical formations in postcolonial countries, Anglophone African writing, South African literature, and theories and practices of cultural translation.

Rowland Atkinson (Sociology)

  •  Disorder, anti-social behaviour, social control and community life in neighbourhoods; gentrification, elite residential developments;
    privatisation of public/residential spaces.

David Beer (Sociology)

  • Popular culture/popular music culture; digital technologies, new media and web cultures; noise and sound in
    urban contexts; social and cultural theory.

Anna Bernard (English and Related Literature)

  • Colonial and postcolonial literatures, especially literatures from the Middle East and South Asia; anti-colonial and postcolonial theory; nationalism; the novel; literature and resistance.

James Boaden (History of Art)

  • American art from the mid-twentieth century, and in particular the crossover between experimental film culture and the art world during that period.

Elizabeth Buettner (History)

  • Social and cultural history of nineteenth and twentieth century Britain and the British empire, particularly concerning ethnicity childhood, gender, personal narratives, memory, and colonial culture, immigration, decolonisation. 

Sabine Clarke (History)

  • The place of science and technology in the British imperial enterprise between 1914 and 1965.

Jason Edwards (History of Art)

  • Psychoanalytic and Queer Theory, especially Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.

Chad Elias (History of Art)

  • Contemporary art practices and visual cultures of the Middle East.

Ziad Elmarsafy (English and Related Literature)

  • The literatures of the Middle East and North Africa (Arabic, French, English), post-colonial literature writ large, literature and religion.

Nicholas Gane (Sociology)

  • Social and cultural theory; sociology of the internet; media theory.

Alex Goodall (History)

  • History of the United States and Latin America, primarily in the twentieth century.

Gabriele Griffin (Women’s Studies)

  • Women's cultural production; contemporary women's theatre; Women's Studies as a discipline; feminist methodology diaspora and postcoloniality; lesbian writing.

Andrew Higson (Theatre, Film and Television)

  • British cinema history, especially the silent period, and the 1990s/2000s; Film Europe in the 1920s; cinema and the past; national/transnational cinema; Anglia Television and the history of ITV.

Stevi Jackson (Women’s Studies)

  • Feminist theory, theories of gender and sexuality, women's and family relationships, sociology of childhood.

Ann Kaloski Naylor (Women’s Studies)

  • Contemporary fiction and culture, particularly death, digital texts and popular culture; feminist cultural politics and production; lesbian, bisexual and queer studies; feminist pedagogy and e-learning.

Gerard McCann (History)

  • Race and ethnicity, diaspora, decolonization, governance, political economy, globalization, historical international relations and ‘development’, particularly related to sub-Saharan Africa and India.

Zoe Norridge (English and Related Literature)

  • Literary representations of conflict and trauma.

Peter Lamarque (Philosophy)

  • Philosophy of literature, theories of imagination, ontology of art, fictionality.

Mark Roodhouse (History)

  • Modern British history, the histories of economic life, crime and criminal justice, everyday ethics, and history and social theory.

Duncan Petrie (Theatre, Film and Television)

  • British, Scottish and New Zealand cinema history; cinematography; Scottish culture; moving image policy and institutions.

Lawrence Rainey (English and Related Literature)

  • Modern poetry, including TS Eliot, Seamus Heaney, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery. Modern fiction: James Joyce and medical culture, the crowd in modernist writing, the question of shame and modernism.

Erica Sheen (English and Related Literature)

  • American and European film; film and literature; the Cold War; animals

Sarah Turner (History of Art)

  • Art and visual culture in Britain and the British Empire (with a particular interest in South Asia), c. 1800-1950; global and transnational networks of artistic practices; sculpture in the twentieth century.

Richard Walsh (English and Related Literature)

  • Narrative theory / theory of fiction, innovative fictions (especially American), narrative across media and narrative approaches to early film.

Claire Westall (English and Related Literature)

  • Postcolonial literature and theory, particularly questions of the nation and national identities; postcolonial rethinking of Englishness, Britishness and the legacies of empire; and the economic, cultural and literary consequences of globalisation.

Michael White (History of Art)

  • Twentieth century European art and architecture, especially Constructivism and Surrealism.

Simon Winlow (Sociology)

  • Critical criminology; consumer culture; identity; working-class culture; social change.