20th - 21st Century

Faculty members researching in this area:

Permanent Postholders: Dr Rebecca Beasley, Dr Matthew Bevis, Professor Elleke Boehmer, Dr David Bradshaw, Professor Valentine Cunningham, Dr Sos Eltis, Dr Patrick Hayes, Ms Jeri Johnson, Dr Susan Jones, Professor Laura Marcus, Dr Peter McDonald (Christ Church), Dr Peter McDonald (St Hugh's), Dr Ankhi Mukherjee, Dr Kirsten Shepherd-Barr, Dr Michael Whitworth.

Research and college staff: Dr Sally Bayley, Dr Faith Binckes, Dr Andrew Blades, Dr Catherine Brown, Dr Simon Cooke, Dr Peter Fifield, Dr Lyndall Gordon, Dr Pelagia Goulimari, Ms Rosalyn Gregory, Dr Oliver Herford, Dr Maria Johnston, Professor Hermione Lee, Dr James Methven, Ms Alys Moody, Dr Carolyn Morningstar, Mr Bernard O'Donoghue, Dr Sowon Park, Dr Tessa Roynon, Dr Reena Sastri, Dr Rebekah Scott, Dr David Sergeant, Ms Yasmine Shamma, Dr James Smith, Dr Matthew Sperling, Dr Tara Stubbs, Dr Julie Taylor, Dr James Williams, and Dr Jarad Zimbler.

Our research:

Particular strengths include modernist studies; post-colonial studies, including the AHRC funded OU-Oxford project ‘Making Britain: Visions of Home and Abroad (1870 – 1950)', on which Boehmer is co-investigator; work on publishing history, particularly censorship; textual scholarship, seen in the preparation of both scholarly and mass-market editions; biography and life-writing; drama and film; science and literature.

Members of the Faculty and the University organise and/or host a wide range of lectures and seminars. The Professor of Poetry’s lectures and those delivered by the Cameron Mackintosh Visiting Professor have often covered modern writing, as have the Clarendon Lectures in English. In addition to the long-running Twentieth Century Graduate Seminar and Fin-de-Siècle Seminar, recent years have seen the Samuel Beckett Seminar, the Postcolonial Writing and Theory Seminar, the Bakhtin/Issues in Theory Seminar, the ‘Bards to Banville’ Irish Literature Seminar, a new Drama in Performance Seminar, the American Literature Colloquium at the Rothermere American Institute, and the graduate-run Twentieth Century Work-in-Progress seminar. There have been many conferences and symposiums, including those on: Edward Thomas; Sylvia Plath; Modern Book History; Cinema and Modernism; Modernism and Visual Culture; Colonial and Post-colonial Cultures of the Book; and Jewish Identity and American Writing.

Recent publications:

Other information: