The University of Birmingham has a lively and growing community of students and staff conducting teaching and research in Popular Fiction.
Dr Amy Burge, Lecturer in Popular Fiction
My teaching and research interests are in popular fiction, in particular romance, both medieval and modern. My work is intersectional and focuses on gender, ethnicity and sexuality. I’m currently working on a study of migration and intimacy in popular romantic fiction. I am Principal Investigator for an AHRC-funded research network on Muslim women’s popular fiction. I teach on the second-year ‘Uses of Genre’ module, the specialist final-year ‘Muslim Women’s Popular Fiction’ module, and on the MA pathway in Popular Fiction.
Dr Dorothy Butchard, Lecturer in Contemporary Literature & Digital Cultures
I teach and research contemporary and twentieth century literature, with particular interest in digital cultures and creative representations of technological change in the modern age. More broadly, my interests include: popular cultures, genres and new media; emergent literary forms including digital poetics and experimental writing; surveillance studies and creative responses to changing power structures in technologized environments.
Dr Melissa Dickson, Lecturer in Victorian Literature
My research focuses on the relationships between Victorian literature, science, medicine, and material culture. I am particularly interested in the study and depiction of the senses and in particular on new ways of listening and thinking about sound in the nineteenth century. My current work is on explorations of the body’s physiological and psychological responses to sound and music in the nineteenth century. I teach across the long nineteenth century. I teach the specialist third year module ‘Nineteenth-Century Detective Fiction’.
Professor Deborah Longworth, Professor of English Literature
I joined the University of Birmingham in 1998, having received my PhD from Birkbeck College, University of London, with a thesis on women, the city and the concept of the flâneuse in nineteenth and twentieth-century English and American literature. My research focuses on English literature from 1880-1940, with a specific focus on gender and modernism and the modernist novel. I teach the specialist final-year module ‘Guilty Pleasures: Reading the Historical Romance’ as well as contributing to the MA Popular Fiction pathway.
Dr Philippa Semper, Lecturer in English
I write about and teach modern fantasy literature and its relationships with medieval texts. I am also interested in Old English language and literature and the interaction between text and image in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts. I offer a final-year literature option on ‘Fantasy and Fandom’ and teach on the MA Popular Fiction pathway. I supervise postgraduates working on fantasy literature.
Dr Will Tattersdill, Senior Lecturer in Popular Literature, Liberal Arts, and Natural Sciences
I work on the relationship between literature and science, especially as it is figured in popular culture from the nineteenth century to the present. I am also interested in book history, periodical studies, museums, imperialism, popular fiction, crime writing, and modernism. My current work is on the social history of dinosaurs over this period. I teach on the second-year ‘Uses of Genre’ module, and offer a final-year specialist module in speculative fiction, ‘Alternative Facts’.