Our experts
Dr Richard Adelman
Senior Lecturer
Research interests
Aestheticism, Critical Theory and Marxism, Dramatic monologue, Eighteenth-century culture, Gothic, Idealist aesthetics, labour, Political economy, Repose, Romanticism, Victorian culture
Dr Sara Jane Bailes
Reader in Theatre & Performance Studies
Research interests
Theatre and performance studies
Prof Peter Boxall
Professor of English
Research interests
Modernist and contemporary writing
Dr Natalia Cecire
Lecturer in English & American Literature
Research interests
19th and 20th century visual cultures, American Studies, Biopolitics, English and American literature, Environment, Experimentalism, Feminist theory, Gender and Sexuality, Gilded Age, Historicisms, History and Philosophy of Science, History of the 19th and 20th-century life sciences, History of the 19th and 20th-century social sciences, Michel Foucault, minor knowledges, Modern and contemporary American poetry, Novel theory, Poetics, Temporality
Prof Sara Crangle
Professor of Modernism and the Avant-Garde
Research interests
Abjection, Affect Studies, Archives and Editing, Avant-Gardism, Bataille, Bathos, Dada, Everydayness, Experimental Poetry, Futurism, Gertrude Stein, Grace Lake/Anna Mendelssohn, High and Late Modernism, James Joyce, Levinas, Mina Loy, Nietzsche, Phenomenology, Satire, Virginia Woolf, Wyndham Lewis
Dr Sue Currell
Reader in American Literature
Research interests
American History, American Studies, Cultural History, English and American literature, Twentieth Century Literature
Dr Denise Decaires Narain
Reader in English
Research interests
Caribbean women's writing
Prof Matthew Dimmock
Professor of Early Modern Studies
Research interests
English literature 1500-1700, History, Islam, Otherness, Prophet Muhammad
Prof Andrew Hadfield
Professor of English
Research interests
Travel writing
Dr Doug Haynes
Senior Lecturer in American Literature and Visual Culture
Research interests
Affect Theory, American Modernism, American Visual Art, Critical Theory, Economic Theory, Fictions of Threat, Ideas of pornography, Ideas of security, Marxism, Modern and contemporary American literature, Postmodern Literature, Psychic phenomena as types of literature, Thomas Pynchon
Prof Margaret Healy
Emeritus Professor
Research interests
medical humanities, Renaissance studies, Shakespeare
Dr Michael Jonik
Lecturer in English and American Literature
Research interests
African American literature and culture, American Philosophy, American Studies, Continental Philosophy, Critical Theory, Critical Theory and Marxism, Deleuze, Early American Literature, Emerson, English and American literature, Foucault, Henry James, History of science, Intellectual History, Melville, Nineteenth-Century American Literature, psychoanalysis, systems theory, Systems Theory; Control, The Transatlantic Enlightenment, Theory of mind, Thoreau
Prof Daniel Kane
Professor of American Literature and Culture
Research interests
Modern and contemporary American poetry, Popular Music, US cinema and popular culture
Prof Maria Lauret
Professor of American Literature and Culture
Research interests
20th C Americanisation in the US, African American literature and culture, Alice Walker, American feminism, American immigrant literature, American immigration, Bharati Mukherjee, Junot Diaz, multilingual literature, Richard Rodriguez
Prof Vicky Lebeau
Professor of English
Research interests
cinema and childhood, image and text, psychoanalysis
Dr John Masterson
Lecturer in World Literatures
Research interests
20th and 21st Century Literature and Art, African American literature and culture, African diasporas, American immigrant literature, apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa, English and American literature, Literary And Cultural Theory, Literature of Exile, Migrant and Diasporic Literature, Postcolonial Literature, Postcolonial Literature and Culture, Postcolonial Literature and Theory, postcolonial studies, South and Southern Africa, World literatures
Dr William McEvoy
Senior Lecturer in English
Research interests
Contemporary Theatre, Playwriting, Site-specific theatre and performance, Theatre and Ethics, Theory and criticism, Writer-director relationship
Dr Rachel O'Connell
Lecturer In Post 1350 English Literature
Research interests
Disability Studies, Gender And Sexuality Studies, Queer studies
Dr Catherine Packham
Senior Lecturer in English
Research interests
Adam Smith, Eighteenth-century culture, Erasmus Darwin, Gender and Sexuality, History of political economy, History of science, Mary Wollstonecraft, Political economy, Scottish Enlightenment, Vitalism
Dr Chloe Porter
Lecturer in English Literature
Research interests
Early modern drama, Early modern material culture, English literature 1500-1700, John Lyly, Materiality, Renaissance studies, Renaissance visual culture, Shakespeare, word and image debates
Dr Jason Price
Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Theatre and Performance
Research interests
Activist Performance, Aesthetics and Politics, Comedy, Contemporary Theatre, Dramaturgy, Marxism, Performance Histories, popular culture, Popular Theatre, Puppet Forms, Site-Specific and Public Art, Theatre and Community
Prof Nicholas Royle
Professor of English
Research interests
20th Century Literature, Creative and critical writing, Deconstruction, Modern and Contemporary Literature and Culture, psychoanalysis, Shakespeare
Mr Martin Ryle
Emeritus Reader
Research interests
Modernism in late nineteenth century fiction
Dr Minoli Salgado
Reader in English
Research interests
Biopolitics, Creative Writing, Human Rights Discourse, Postcolonial Literature and Theory, Salman Rushdie, South Asian Literature in English, Terror and Transnational Writing, Trauma studies
Prof Lindsay Smith
Professor of English
Research interests
Visual perception in the 19th century
Dr Samuel Solomon
Lecturer in Creative and Critical Writing
Research interests
Contemporary Poetry, Creative and critical writing, Feminist theory, Gender and Sexuality, Literary And Cultural Theory, Marxism, Modernist and contemporary writing, Print Culture
Dr Bethan Stevens
Lecturer in English and Creative & Critical Writing
Research interests
Book Illustration, Creative and critical writing, Historical Fiction, Modernism, Museum Studies, popular culture, The History of Printmaking, The Long Nineteenth Century, The Novel, The Short Story, Victorian culture, Word and Image Theory
Prof Keston Sutherland
Professor of Poetics
Research interests
Contemporary Poetry, Critical Theory, Marx, Philosophy, Poetics, psychoanalysis, Romanticism, Samuel Beckett, Wordsworth
Dr Pam Thurschwell
Reader
Research interests
adolescence in literature, British Modernism, English and American literature, Henry James, Literary And Cultural Theory, psychoanalysis, Queer Theory, The supernatural (19th/20th century)
Dr Katie Walter
Senior Lecturer in Medieval English Literature
Research interests
Medieval English literature, Medieval literary theory, Medieval medicine, Reading practices, Reginald Pecock, The body, The senses, Vernacular theology, William Langland
Prof Marcus Wood
Professor of English
Research interests
Medical, Religious and literary traditions in late medieval England
Dr Tom Wright
Senior Lecturer in English
Research interests
American Studies, citizenship, Cultural History, Media & Communication Studies, Nineteenth century literature and culture, Theatre and performance studies
Course enquiries
+44 (0)1273 678468
englishpg@sussex.ac.uk
Dissertation (English MA programmes)
- 60 credits
- Summer Teaching, Year 1 credits
This module gives you the opportunity to undertake supervised work on a dissertation of up to 20,000 words, on a topic of your choice agreed with your supervisor. If you are a part-time student, you will begin your background reading for the dissertation in the first summer term and vacation of your studies.
American Poetry after Modernism: Retreat? Redirection? Rediscovery?
- 30 credits
- Autumn Semester, Year 1 credits
This module explores the development of American poetry and poetics in the wake of British and American Modernist writing. Beginning with Charles Olson's groundbreaking essay 'Projective Verse' (1950), we continue to consider the emergence of chance-generated and collaboratively-produced texts (John Cage, Jackson Mac Low); the tensions between a racialized 'Black Arts' movement (LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka) and the quotidian, queer poetics of the New York School (Frank O'Hara, Barbara Guest, John Ashbery); and the work of geographically-based poetic communities such as Black Mountain, Beat, and San Francisco Renaissance 'schools'. The relation of the poets' theories of poetry to their work is a central concern throughout. The final three weeks of the module will be devoted to reading books by contemporary poets such as Harryette Mullen, Linh Dinh, and Kevin Davies for whom postmodern theories of subjectivity play a central concern in terms of addressing poetry's relationship to questions of race, gender, and class.
Bearing Witness: Terror and Trauma in Global Literature
- 30 credits
- Autumn Semester, Year 1 credits
The module explores the representation of terror, trauma and testimonial address in a range of contemporary international literary texts. Through a textual and contextual study of these works, key issues such as the non-narratability of trauma, the ethics of speaking for the other, the intersection between the politics of reading, writing and bearing witness, the creation of cross-cultural communities in the representation and reading of trauma, and the relationship between gender, intimacy and the representation of the body in pain, will be studied in relation to critical readings from terror and trauma studies.
The range of literary texts reflects the global cultural reach of the module, from postcolonial texts from a wide range of cultural locations to literatures that engage with critical discourses generated by the Holocaust and the War on Terror. Opening with an emphasis on cross-cultural connections and critical readings, the focus on historical positioning becomes more pronounced as the module proceeds.
Blackness, Innocence, Modernity
- 30 credits
- Autumn Semester, Year 1 credits
In this module you will theorise modernity’s deeply racialised encounters with the temporalities of innocence.
You historicise psychoanalytic and anthropological discourses of development in concepts of childhood, primitivism, and deferral.
You also examine how the production of innocence structures legal, epistemological, and aesthetic questions in U.S. literature and culture.
You will write a series of blog posts and a research essay.
Critical Issues in Queer Theory
- 30 credits
- Autumn Semester, Year 1 credits
Queer theory and/or queer studies, which first emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s, brings poststructuralist epistemologies and radical political sensibilities to the social, cultural, and historical study of sexuality – and, indeed, the study of eroticism, relationality, and kinship more broadly.
This module provides you with the opportunity to gain an overview of key concepts and debates in queer theory and to read important queer theoretical texts in depth. We will discuss some foundational texts in queer theory and will explore some of the intellectual, social, cultural, and political contexts from which queer theory emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
We will also explore a selection of key issues and approaches in contemporary queer studies, which might include:
- transgender theories
- affect studies
- transnational contexts
- theorisations of contemporary neoliberalism.
Throughout this module you will work to build up a theoretical foundation that will allow you to attend in nuanced and informed ways to the politics of sexuality, relationship, and kinship as these politics are manifested and remade in texts and other cultural artefacts.
ImagiNation: The Great American Novel
- 30 credits
- Spring Semester, Year 1 credits
'The Great American Novel' became something of a shibboleth in the 20th century, for American writers and critics alike. Was it possible to capture the essence, as well as the diversity, of the American nation in fiction? And if so, how should this be done – in a novel of panoramic reach, such as John Dos Passos' USA to Don De Lillo's Underworld, or in representation of America's historico-political unconscious, such as Toni Morrison's Beloved or Jayne Anne Phillips' Machine Dreams, or could a topic so ostensibly small as family life come to take on the burden of representative American-ness, as in Jonathan Frantzen's The Corrections?
In this course you will look at representations of American history in fiction-both film and literature-to discover how American fiction of the 20th and 21st centuries has represented American history, politics, and most of all national identity. Because of this subject matter, you will be taking on big novels, which may also be great –though the definition of 'greatness' will itself be part of your investigation, rather than a foregone conclusion. You will, for example, consider questions of representativeness as well as representation, and this will involve issues of gender, race and ethnicity, mainstream and margin, the local and the cosmopolitan. You will be drawing on cultural theory and historiography to put your reading and viewing into scholarly perspective.
International Modernisms, 1840-Present
- 30 credits
- Spring Semester, Year 1 credits
This module will take a long view of modernism, one inextricable from the development of avant-garde aesthetics.
Europe is often credited with the inception of experimental, self-reflexive artistic practice. In our reading, we will examine continental authors and aim to take a more global view of avant-gardism. We will attend to influential authors that are not often or readily considered in English-speaking university curricula. These writers – French, Italian, Russian, German, American, Spanish, Chilean, Argentine, and Caribbean – challenge, reinforce, and expand more familiar models of Anglo-American modernism.
You will go beyond just reading manifestos and overviews of the Dadist movement – we will ask you not only to think about what Futurism is, but to closely read F.T. Marinetti's Mafarka the Futurist: An African Novel. The module encompasses fiction, drama, and poetry. All works will be read in English, and issues of translation and transmission will form part of our discussion.
Literature and Society, 1750-1890
- 30 credits
- Autumn Semester, Year 1 credits
Literature & Society, 1750-1890 explores the interplay between the nationwide perspectives of social philosophy and the more individualistic concerns of literary culture in the late 18th and 19th centuries. It offers you a chance to make broad connections across the period, at the same time as providing you with in-depth knowledge of principal theoreticians of culture in these decades and their major works. Emphasis will be placed on the manner in which literary works can be read in conversation with, and in opposition to, social theory with each seminar structured around close readings of an example of each style of writing.
Literature in the Institution: the university and the study of culture
- 30 credits
- Autumn Semester, Year 1 credits
We live, work and study in the midst of the large-scale transformation of education at local, national and international levels. A related (but not identicial) development is the growing, although certainly not new, 'crisis' of the humanities characterised by myriad explanations of just what it is that we do and by contentious justifications for just why do we do it. As students and scholars of literature and culture, we may wonder how these two interrelated phenomena came into being and what exactly the study of literatures and cultures can contribute to their resolution. This module will take on these questions through a range of approaches. We will consider the origins of the European research university and its connections to moral philosophy, the relatively recent development of the study of 'English' in the UK and its former colonies, the relationship between higher education and the 20th century welfare state, the uses of literary and cultural study as parts of social movements within and outside of the University, and contemporary debates about the privatisation and market-rationalisation of education.
Modernist and Contemporary Fictions
- 30 credits
- Autumn Semester, Year 1 credits
This module will explore the terms modernism and postmodernism, and the relationship between the two, by reading a range of novels which engage with issues of artistic form, subjectivity, and modernity. We'll ask a variety of questions including:
- How has the 20th and 21st century novel represented the attempt to delineate the shape of individual lives through ‘portraits’?
- What changes to the novel’s terrain have been effected by contemporary history, war, or historical trauma?
- How useful is the term postmodernism for describing contemporary writing?
- How have high and mass cultural forms, such as visual art, the cinema, the web, etc. influenced contemporary writing?
- How do recent novels portray the aesthetic?
- What different ideas of temporality do we find in modernist and postmodernist writing?
- What versions of borrowing from the past do we find in modernism and postmodernism and what purposes do these borrowings serve?
- Is there what the critic Andreas Huyssen has called a ‘great divide’ between modernism and postmodernism?
- What continuities might we find between modernism and postmodernism (if those terms are still useful)?
Authors read will include Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Virginia Woolf, Don DeLillo, J.M. Coetzee, Jonathan Coe and Marilynne Robinson.
Modernist and Contemporary Fictions
- 30 credits
- Spring Semester, Year 1 credits
This module will explore the terms modernism and postmodernism, and the relationship between the two, by reading a range of novels which engage with issues of artistic form, subjectivity, and modernity. We'll ask a variety of questions including: How has the 20th and 21st century novel represented the attempt to delineate the shape of individual lives through 'portraits'? What changes to the novel's terrain have been effected by contemporary history, war, or historical trauma? How useful is the term postmodernism for describing contemporary writing? How have high and mass cultural forms, such as visual art, the cinema, the web, etc. influenced contemporary writing? How do recent novels portray the aesthetic? What different ideas of temporality do we find in modernist and postmodernist writing? What versions of borrowing from the past do we find in modernism and postmodernism and what purposes do these borrowings serve? Is there what the critic Andreas Huyssen has called a 'great divide' between modernism and postmodernism? What continuities might we find between modernism and postmodernism (if those terms are still useful)? Authors read will include Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Virginia Woolf, Don DeLillo, J.M. Coetzee, Jonathan Coe and Marilynne Robinson.
New Configurations in Critical Theory
- 30 credits
- Spring Semester, Year 1 credits
This module will explore a wide range of contemporary critical approaches that have emerged not only out of the influential work of 20th century philosophy, literary theory and psychoanalysis, but also from a variety of disciplinary quarters. Our investigations will be loosely mapped to four interrelated topics of literature, aesthetics, politics and science but comprise a number of pressing theoretical issues. These are: affect, biopolitics, 'life', impersonality, animality, the posthuman, the status of conceptual art, the earth, political ontology, the common and communism, new materialisms, science and the brain, networks and information, systems theory and complexity theory. Possible readings include the work of Deleuze, Guattari, Agamben, Badiou, Rancière, Esposito, Bennett, Malabou, Smithson or Luhmann.
The Migrant Writer: Postcolonialism and Creativity
- 30 credits
- Spring Semester, Year 1 credits
'To write ... is to travel', according to Iain Chambers; the module will use this idea to explore the displacement of the writing subject within the historical context of globalisation and postcolonial migration. The work of key migrant writers will be analysed in relation to central concepts in literary and cultural criticism: hybridity and dialogical discourse, the development of 'border languages', mimicry and the migrant subject, homelessness and the creation of new cartographies, the politics of witnessing, the cultural representation of trauma, and diasporic and non-originary histories.
In the first half of the module we will consider these concepts in relation to texts from a wide range of transnational sites; in the second half they will be studied in relation to the contested spaces of Islam in the West and the Cambodian genocide.
The Renaissance Body
- 30 credits
- Autumn Semester, Year 1 credits
In early-modern England the body was a major intellectual preoccupation and a focal metaphor informing and shaping cultural structures and artefacts. This period, too, like the cusp of the 21st century, had a very distinctive conception of the person as a construct or artifice, as the product of social intervention and cultural organization. Engaging with interpretative models from the fascinating interdisciplinary field of cultural theory of the body, you will explore the aesthetics of embodiment through a range of literary and visual texts, unravelling the dense significance of the corporeal imagination of the Renaissance. Key themes include: body borders, the supernatural and society; gendered voices, sex and agency; the medical imagination; diabolic inversions (the witch's body); heroic and monstrous masculinities; transvestitism; mystical monarchy; diseased bodies; revolutionary corporealities; body, soul and mind; consuming bodies and eating communities; the fabricated body; and pornography.
The Uncanny
- 30 credits
- Spring Semester, Year 1 credits
The uncanny is difficult to define – mysterious, eerie, at once strange and familiar. It offers especially productive possibilities for exploring issues of identity and liminality, boundaries and interdisciplinarity. You engage with the uncanny across a range of texts and contexts, from literature (novels, short stories, drama and poetry) to film. Discussion will focus on a number of linked topics, including repetition, doubles, strange coincidences, animism, live burial, telepathy, death and laughter.
You'll develop your reading and critical analysis skills, as nature of the uncanny invites intellectual uncertainty and calls for an unusual critical patience.This enhances your capacity for critical reflection on the experience of the familiar and the strange, the ordinary and the extraordinary.
Theory in Practice: Readings in Contemporary Theory and Literature
- 30 credits
- Autumn Semester, Year 1 credits
What is 'theory'? Although it goes in and out of fashion with the speed of rising or plunging hemlines, the use of theory, literary theory, or literary criticism as a way to read literary texts is always useful. And contrary to popular opinion, it's not the application of an arcane or secret language to garner a secret knowledge. Rather, it is a self-conscious and informed method of analysing the presuppositions behind the apparently natural way we read; indeed, sometimes it's a method of reading in itself, derived from a philosophy or theory of language, as is the case with Bataille or Derrida. Theory sounds dull, but really it's a creative practice, as is reading, which Walter Benjamin likened to telepathy.
This module seeks, through a number of case studies, to address a number of critical paradigms that have proved significant in the post-war period. In particular, notions of materialism, materiality and historicity will be set in tension with ideas about relativism, deconstruction and 'play' as very different ways of construing some iconic American texts. Alongside the close reading of primary and secondary texts, discussions in class will be directed towards such subjects as: the construction/reflection of subjectivity in language and discourse; the relation of the literary text to sociality; the effects and efficacy of modernist/avant-garde/postmodern literary techniques; and the writing of race, gender and class.
Voices in the Archives: Writing from History
- 30 credits
- Spring Semester, Year 1 credits
In this module you will consider how writers draw on history to shape their creative writing.
You will think about how different literary genres engage with the past through form, narrative and literary language, and look at the cultural impact of contemporary historical fiction. You will also consider work by poets and film-makers.
Authors studied may include Sarah Waters, Ian McEwan, Toni Morrison, Hilary Mantel, David Dabydeen, Mario Petrucci, George Szirtes and Michel Hazanavicius.
You will take part in creative workshops and develop key research skills, exploring the methodological implications of using physical and virtual archives.
You will work with historical newspapers, letters, diaries, prints, photographs and other documents to experiment with using language from the past to inflect contemporary voices.
Topics for discussion include the critical and ethical implications of writing about real historical events and characters. You will consider how contemporary writing is founded on a long tradition of writing from history, often re-visiting the past with a particular political or creative agenda, from Shakespeare and Dickens onwards.
You'll also explore how recent historical fiction interacts with other genres, for example in the fantasies of Susanna Clarke and Angela Carter and consider theoretical work on memory and nostalgia by critics such as Mieke Bal and Svetlana Boym.
Voices in the Archives: Writing from History
- 30 credits
- Spring Semester, Year 1 credits
We think about how different literary genres engage with the past through form, narrative and literary language, looking at the cultural impact of contemporary historical fiction, and also considering work by poets and film-makers. Authors studied include Virginia Woolf, Sarah Waters, Toni Morrison, Hilary Mantel, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Michael Chabon, and Chinua Achebe. Creative writing workshops introduce key research skills, exploring the methodological implications of using physical and virtual archives. Working with historical newspapers, letters, diaries, prints, photographs and other documents, we immerse ourselves in old-fangled vocabularies, and experiment with using language from the past to inflect our contemporary voices.
Topics for discussion include the critical and ethical implications of writing about real historical events and characters. We consider how contemporary writing is founded on a long tradition of writing from history - often re-visiting the past with a particular political or creative agenda. Additionally, we explore how historical fiction interacts with other genres, for example in the crime-historical hybrids of Walter Mosley. We consider theoretical work on historical fiction, memory and nostalgia by critics such as Georg Lukacs and Walter Benjamin.