Literature and Cultures

Our Literature and Cultures staff are internationally respected scholars with particular expertise in American literature and culture, British literature and non-British European writings.

Overview

Our experts in British literature have focused on modern and contemporary poetry and contemporary fiction, while our scholarship in Creative Writing is backed by our staff’s publication of novels and poetry collections and stagings of their plays.

Thus, our Americanists have been working on such areas as the Black Atlantic culture, memorialisation and African American slavery, African American visual arts, comedy and humour, the Civil War in US culture, the culture of the 1970s, radical American protest music and American theatre and performance (including its British connections).

Our experts in British literature have focused on modern and contemporary poetry, contemporary fiction, and Shakespeare and performance, while our scholarship in non-British European writings includes work on Albert Camus, Frederico García Lorca and narratives of the Holocaust.

Our staff have been awarded several British, American and European Research Fellowships by such bodies as the AHRC, the British Academy, the Broadcast Music Industry Foundation and the European Union. We are often called upon for peer review by funding organisations, major academic publishers and leading academic journals on both sides of the Atlantic.

In 2019 we were proud to welcome Dr Astrid Haas and Dr Nicole Willson as Research Fellows. Dr Haas specializes in travel writing and autobiography of the Americas, African Diaspora and Latinx Studies, Gender, and Science Studies, and is with us under the auspices of a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship. Dr Willson is currently a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Research Fellow specialising in the intersection of Black Studies, Haitian Studies and American and Caribbean Cultural Studies.

In early 2023 Professor Will Kaufman was awarded the highly competitive Phil Ochs Fellowship, named in honour of the late US songwriter and topical folksinger. The annual Phil Ochs Fellowship is a partnership between the Woody Guthrie Center Archives and A Still Small Voice Inc. This annual opportunity awards up to $5,000 USD for research investigating folk music from 1930s-1980s related to Ochs and his contemporaries.

Will has received the full award of $5000 USD and will spend three weeks researching in the Woody Guthrie Archives and the Bob Dylan Archives in Tulsa during March and April 2023. This research will feed into his forthcoming monograph for Cambridge University Press ‘American Song and Struggle from World War Two to #BlackLivesMatter’. This will be a follow-up volume to Will’s recently published ‘American Song and Struggle from Columbus to World War Two’ (Cambridge UP, 2022), which received several endorsements from historians, academics, high-profile singers and songwriters.

Dr Robert Duggan: contemporary British fiction and the grotesque
Dr Anna Richardson Hunter: Contemporary Holocaust narratives
Professor Will Kaufman: Woody Guthrie and US protest music; the American 1970s; the Civil War in American culture; US comedy and humour; transatlantic studies
Dr Yvonne Reddick: Ted Hughes and his influences; environmental literature; poetry and creative writing
Professor Alan Rice: slavery memorialisation; the Black Atlantic; African American visual arts
Dr Theresa Saxon: American theatre history; transatlantic performance
Dr Naomi Kruger: Creative writing and the novel
Dr Philip Braithwaite: Creative writing, specialising in scriptwriting (stage and screen)
Dr Raphael Hoermann: the Black Atlantic and the Haitian Revolution

We are demonstrably committed to extending the reach and significance of our research beyond the bounds of academia, as witnessed in:

Stuart Hampton-Reeves’s directorial and advocacy activities on behalf of the British Shakespeare Association;

Will Kaufman’s internationally acclaimed performance pieces and “live documentaries” on Woody Guthrie;

Alan Rice’s advisory roles, curatorship and exhibition work on slavery and the Black Atlantic with such eminent organisations as the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool and the Whitworth Gallery in Manchester;

Theresa Saxon’s public lectures on nineteenth-century American theatrical performance.

Robert Duggan is the author of (Manchester University Press, 2013) as well as numerous articles on contemporary British novelists.The Grotesque in Contemporary British Fiction

Yvonne Reddick has published book chapters and journal articles on Ted Hughes, Frederico García Lorca and Henry Williamson.

Anna Richardson Hunter has published essays on Holocaust narratives in such journals asModernism and Modernity, Synthesis and the European Journal of English Studies.

Will Kaufman’s books include (Wayne State University Press, 1997), (Edinburgh University Press, 2006), American Culture in the 1970s (Edinburgh University Press, 2009), (University of Illinois Press, 2011), (2017) and (2019).The Comedian as Confidence Man: Studies in Irony FatigueThe Civil War in American CultureWoody Guthrie, American RadicalWoody Guthrie’s Modern World BluesMapping Woody Guthrie

Alan Rice has written among many books, books chapters and journal articles, (Continuum, 2003) and (Liverpool University Press, 2010); he co-edited, with Martin Crawford, . (University of Georgia Press, 1999) and co-curated an exhibition on “Trade and Empire” for the Whitworth Gallery.Radical Narratives of the Black AtlanticCreating Memorials, Building Identities: The Politics of Memory in the Black AtlanticLiberating Sojourn: Frederick Douglas and Transatlantic Reform

Theresa Saxon has published (Edinburgh University Press, 2011) as well as articles on nineteenth-century American theatre, pantomime and burlesque.American Theatre: History, Content, Form

Naomi Kruger has published the novel, (2018).May

Raphael Hoermann publishes scholarly articles on the Haitian Revolution and its representation in transatlantic culture.

Philip Braithwaites playscripts have won awards from the BBC World Service and the British Council, among other prestigious award bodies.

Poets have a great deal to say about grief; many people read poems at funerals and poetry is the only kind of writing to have a special form devoted to mourning, the elegy.
Friday 29 October 2021
Professor Will Kaufman's research practice has revolved around the use of archival materials to understand Woody Guthrie’s activism
Friday 17 September 2021

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