Directors
Dr Sara Crangle is a senior lecturer in English and has been at the University of Sussex since 2007. She completed her PhD at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, and then undertook a research fellowship at Queens' College, Cambridge. Her work has predominantly focussed on ideological intersections between high modernist writers: Joyce, Stein, Woolf, Beckett; and philosophical thought. Her book on this topic, Prosaic Desires: Modernist Knowledge, Boredom, Laughter, and Anticipation, was published with Edinburgh University Press (2010). She has published articles on Dada, bathos, Mina Loy, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Christine Brooke-Rose, and Veronica Forrest-Thomson. Her article on Woolf and boredom won the Margaret Church Modern Fiction Studies Memorial Prize in 2009. She co-edited a book of essays with Peter Nicholls entitled On Bathos: Literature, Art, Music (Continuum 2010). Her poetry can be found in Wild Ascending Lisp (chapbook; Critical Documents) and Cambridge Literary Review (1:2): 2010.
Dr Pam Thurschwell is a senior lecturer in English. She has previously taught at University College London. She has worked on the intersection of psychoanalysis, interest in the supernatural at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, and new technologies. She has also published on popular culture and film. Her books include Sigmund Freud (Routledge, 2000), Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880-1920 (Cambridge University Press, 2001), The Victorian Supernatural, co-editor with Nicola Bown and Carolyn Burdett (Cambridge University Press, 2004), and Literary Secretaries/Secretarial Culture, co-editor with Leah Price (Ashgate Press, 2005). Her current project, about representations of adolescence in literature and culture, is titled Out of Time: Adolescence and Anachronism in the 20th Century.
Founding director
Professor Peter Nicholls is Professor of English and American Literature, now at New York University. His publications include Ezra Pound: Politics, Economics and Writing, Modernisms: A Literary Guide, George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism, and many articles and essays on literature and theory. He recently co-edited with Laura Marcus The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature and is editor of the journal Textual Practice.
Centre faculty
Prof. Peter Boxall has published widely on the work of Samuel Beckett. His books include Don DeLillo: The Possibility of Fiction (London: Routledge, 2006) and Since Beckett: Contemporary Writing in the Wake of Modernism (London: Continuum, 2009). He is currently working on Twenty-First Century Fiction: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) and The Oxford History of the Novel, vol 7, British and Irish Fiction since 1940, edited with Bryan Cheyette (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). He is the general editor of Textual Practice.
Prof. Paul Betts is the author of The Pathos of Everyday Objects: A Cultural History of West German Industrial Design, 1945-65 and is currently working on a study of East German material culture and aspects of East German Modernism.
Dr Susan Currell is a senior lecturer in American Literature. Her publications include American Culture in the 1920s (2009), The March of Spare Time (2005) and Popular Eugenics (2006). Her work examines the intersections between intellectual discourse and popular culture in America of the early 20th century. She has written essays on leisure during the Great Depression, on the development of speed reading between 1870-1940, the growth of self-improvement literature in the 1930s and the relationship between eugenics and popular culture in America of the 1930s. She is currently working on several projects including American drama of the interwar period, eugenics and city planning and the political linguistics of the 1930s writers.
Dr Alistair Davies has research interests in Modernism, film and literature, and has published on Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, Yeats and Eliot. He is co-editor of British Culture of the Post-War and is currently writing a book on post-war fiction.
Dr Paul Davies has research interests in continental philosophy and has published widely on aesthetics, phenomenology, Kant and post-Kantian European philosophy. He is currently completing a book on the philosophy of art entitled Poems, Works and Contexts and a volume of essays on Blanchot and Levinas. He is planning a study of Kant and the nature of philosophy.
Dr Rosalind Galt has research interests in film theory, comparative European cinemas, history and aesthetics. She is the author of The New European Cinema: Redrawing the Map (Columbia, 2006) and is currently writing a monograph on film theory and the aesthetics and politics of the pretty.
Dr Douglas Haynes has research interests in Modernist, postmodernist and avant-garde writing, visual art and music, particularly as these interact with critical theory. He has published on French Surrealism and on American Modernism.
Dr Daniel Kane has written extensively on poets affiliated with the New York Schools (including John Ashbery, Ted Berrigan, and Bernadette Mayer). His most recent book, entitled "We Saw the Light": Conversations Between The New American Cinema and Poetry, focuses on the aesthetic exchanges between 'New American' filmmakers and poets of the 1950s and 1960s, examining how the work of filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage, Kenneth Anger, Alfred Leslie, Rudy Burckhardt and Robert Frank influenced and intersected with poets such as Frank O'Hara, Robert Duncan, John Ashbery, Allen Ginsberg and Robert Creeley.
Dr Kate Lacey is the author of Feminine Frequencies: Gender, German Radio and the Public Sphere 1923-45. Her current research focuses on the modernisation of listening and ideas of the listening public.
Dr Maria Lauret has recently published Alice Walker and has co-authored Beginning Ethnic American Fictions. She is currently completing projects on bi- and multi-lingual writing, and on gender and migration in American literature.
Prof. Vicky Lebeau has research interests in 19th- and20th-century literature, film and psychoanalysis. Her publications include Lost Angels: Cinema, Identification, Dispossession and Psychoanalysis and Cinema. She is currently working on a study of the figure of the child in film and literature.
Prof. Ladislaus Löb, Emeritus Professor of German at the University of Sussex, is the translator of Otto Weininger's Sex and Character. He has published widely on German and English literature, particularly drama. Since his retirement he has concentrated on translating from German and Hungarian.
Dr Nicholas McKay has published essays on Stravinsky and is currently working on the application of semiotics to music theory.
Professor David Alan Mellor has written numerous books on 20th-century painting, film and photography, has curated major exhibitions on 20th-century art and photography, and has particular interests in late 19th- and20th-century cultural history and visual representation. His publications include A Paradise Lost and The Sixties Art Scene in London.
Dr John David Rhodes is the author of Stupendous, Miserable City: Pasolini's Rome (Minnesota, 2007). He is currently at work on a book about modern domestic architecture as a cultural form and he is a founding co-editor of World Picture
Professor Nicholas Royle has research interests in modern literature and literary theory. He is author of numerous books, including Telepathy and Literature, E.M.Forster, Jacques Derrida, The Uncanny and (with Andrew Bennett) Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel. He has also recently published his first novel, Quilt. He is an editor of the Oxford Literary Review.
Professor Lindsay Smith has research interests in 19th- and early-20th-century aesthetics, literature and visual culture. She is the author of Victorian Photography, Painting and Poetry, and The Politics of Focus: Women, Children and Nineteenth-Century Photography. She is currently writing books on Lewis Carroll and John Ruskin.
Dr Keston Sutherland is a poet and critic. His publications include Hot White Andy, Neocosis, Neutrality, The Rictus Flag and Antifreeze, plus articles and essays on Marx, Prynne, Adorno, O'Hara, Rodefer and on British and American contemporary avant-garde poetry in general. He is the editor of Barque Press and of QUID.
Professor Edward Timms is past Director of the Centre for German-Jewish Studies at the University of Sussex. He has published widely on Austrian literature and culture, with a particular focus on Viennese Modernism and psychoanalysis. He is author of Karl Kraus, Apocalyptic Satirist and editor of Unreal City: Urban Experience in Modern European Literature and Art and Visions and Blueprints: Avant-Garde Culture and Radical Politics in Early Twentieth-Century Europe.
Dr Christian Weikop teaches art history at the University of Sussex. He is an expert on German art and culture, but has an active interest in all modern and contemporary art. His latest essay is published in the catalogue for the 'Neue Galerie' New York exhibition, Brücke: The Birth of Expressionism in Dresden and Berlin, 1905-1913 (26 February-29 June 29), which was organized by Professor Reinhold Heller.