Voices and Communities

Our Research

In our research we recover, amplify, and analyse voices, and explore ideas of identity and community from a wide variety of perspectives.

Current Topics 

The team is working on a number of projects including:

Literature and transience/vagrancy, particularly in American literature and culture 1890-1940, including the recovery and scholarly editing of hobo writers, T-Bone Slim and Roving Bill Aspinwall.

Twenty-first century literary and cultural responses to border crossings, including ‘Brexlit’ and the new genre of post-Brexit fiction, literary cosmopolitanism as a response to globalisation, transnational mobility, and technological change, and migration, devolution, and the ‘transglossic’. 

US prison writings from the American Revolution to the present day addressing the many significant works of literature and philosophy that have been produced in prison that have been overlooked within the field of US literary studies.

Black British poetry in performance since 1965, foregrounding the significance of poetry performance to recent British literary history and exploring the decolonial potential of spoken word poetry.

‘Provincial Shakespeare’ addresses how Shakespeare signifies in the English Midlands and how provincial identities were understood in the Early Modern period, examining the politics and micropolitics of provincial identity.

‘Folk Gothic in Britain and Ireland’ examines how the Gothic both reinforces and challenges constructions of so-called ‘peripheral’ regions across the British and Irish Isles, and traces the distinctive expressions of Gothic at work in these places from the early nineteenth century to the contemporary period.

Medieval outlaw communities, with a focus on socio-political contexts and the role of homosocial bonds in outlaw narratives, especially stories of Robin Hood and his companions.