People

NAARG members are active researchers and the work that we do in English and Creative Writing and in Film and Television Studies spans North American and transatlantic literature back to the nineteenth century, as well as film, television, popular music, critical theory, video games, and comics and graphic novels.

Dr Jason Baskin

Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Literature

Research interests: modern and contemporary literature, especially 1945 to present; American literature; African American, multiethnic, and contemporary global literature; phenomenology and philosophies of embodiment; Marxism and critical theory; cultural geography and critical urban studies

Dr Joanna Freer

Lecturer in American & Postcolonial Literature

Research interests: literature and counter-communities; literary representations of gender and sex; intersections between politics and economy in fiction

Professor Helen Hanson

Associate Professor in Film History

Research interests: film history; film style and technology; film sound and music; adaptation; gender issues

Dr Henry Knight Lozano

Senior Lecturer in History and Liberal Arts

Research interests: U.S. expansion; place promotion; issues of race, climate, human-animal interactions; environment, with a particular focus on the United States’ tropical and semi-tropical frontiers – California, Florida, and Hawai’i

Professor James Lyons

Associate Professor of Film Studies

Research interests: contemporary American film and television; American indie culture (especially film, comics, and music); theories of popular culture and taste

Dr Ellen McWilliams

Senior Lecturer

Research interests: contemporary women’s fiction; the Bildungsroman; Irish, American, and Canadian literature; writing and diasporic identity

Professor Sinéad Moynihan

Professor in American and Atlantic Literatures

Research interests: twentieth-century literature; American literature; Irish literature; race; transnationalism

Professor Vike Martina Plock

Professor in Twentieth-Century Literature

Research interests: literary modernism; medicine; James Joyce; interwar women’s writing; consumer culture; fashion

Dr Debra Ramsay

Senior Lecturer in Film Studies

Research interests: war, memory, and media, with particular focus on paratexts, audiences, technologies, and industries; contemporary theories of media and memory

Dr Peter Riley

Senior Lecturer in American Literature

Research interests: nineteenth- through early twentieth-century American literature in relation to labour history, poetry and poetics, and archival studies, with developing focuses on German American literature, radical politics, and race and ethnicity in the United States; Peter also writes non-fiction, and is particularly interested in the relationship between creative and critical prose.

Dr Mark Steven

Senior Lecturer in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Literature

Research interests: narrative responses to capitalism, socialism, and the possibility of communism; modernism; the aesthetics of horror; Marxism

Dr Rob Turner

Senior Lecturer in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Literature

Research interests: American literature; postmodernism; the epic; (in)authenticity; African American utopian and speculative fiction; the poetics of hip-hop

Professor Paul Williams

Associate Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture

Research interests: comics and graphic novels; the United States in the long 1970s; cultural responses to alternative psychotherapies; race and ethnicity; postapocalyptic fictions

Professor Linda Ruth Williams

Professor in Film Studies

Research interests: post-classical American cinema; British cinema; classical Hollywood; psychoanalytic critical and cultural theory; gender and culture; representations of sexuality and the history of censorship; children and childhood in Spielberg; contemporary women filmmakers; film exhibition and curation