Staff Profiles

Rose Atfield established the undergraduate and postgraduate Creative Writing programmes at Brunel and  has been delighted at the appointments of Celia Brayfield and Fay Weldon, together with other creative practitioners, as these courses develop and expand. She has taught creative writing for over twenty years and as a member of the national Association of Writers in Education has contributed to numerous conferences and journals on different areas of the discipline. She is particularly interested in the connections between dance and literature.

Jessica obtained her PhD from Swansea University and worked as a lecturer at the University of Wales Lampeter before moving to Brunel in 2009. She is the co-founder of the Brunel Interdisciplinary Network on Gender and Sexuality (click here for more details) and recently organised the bi-annual Feminist and Women’s Studies Association conference on The Futures of Feminism, held at Brunel in July 2011.

She is currently editing a collection of essays on Victorian sensation author Mary Elizabeth Braddon, co-editing, with Professor Mark Llewellyn (University of Strathclyde), an anthology set entitled Women and Belief (part of Routledge’s History of Feminism series), and authoring a study provisionally entitled Neo-Victorian Sensations: Rewriting Victorian Sensation Fiction in Contemporary Literature.

Elizabeth studied English & Related (Anglo-Saxon and Latin) Literature at York University as an undergraduate. Her Masters degree was in Book History, Editing and the Transmission of Text at Birmingham University, and she returned to York University for her PhD on the production and transmission of printed propaganda during the Tudor period. She came to Brunel from the History Faculty at the University of Cambridge in 2007. So her work is interdisciplinary, covering the fields of historical research, literary criticism and bibliography.

Elizabeth is the convenor of the Religious History of Britain 1500-1800 seminar at The Institute of Historical Research at Senate House, London. She was recently a guest on Radio 4’s In Our Time with Lord Melvyn Bragg, discussing the production and dissemination of John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs.

Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina is a professor in English, specialising in the novel, Victorian studies, Black British and American studies, the Bloomsbury set, and biography. She joined Brunel in 2011, after being a professor and head of department at Dartmouth College in America.

She is the author of four books, and the editor of three, as well as having authored numerous articles. Her first book, a biography of the Bloomsbury figure Dora Carrington, was published by John Murray, W.W. Norton, and Chatto & Windus. Her second book Black England: Life Before Emancipation, was published by John Murray and Rutgers University Press. Two further biographies followed: Frances Hodgson Burnett: The Unpredictable Life of the Author of The Secret Garden (Chatto & Windus and Rutgers University Press), and Mr and Mrs Prince (HarperCollins), the story of the joint discovery of 18^th-century former slaves in New England who went on to become legendary original settlers and landowners, successfully arguing cases in court. The edited books comprise two editions of The Secret Garden and Black Victorians/Black Victoriana (Rutgers University Press).

In 2009-10, she was on the three-person jury to select the finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She has been the Fulbright Distinguished Scholar to Great Britain (at the University of Exeter), held two grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and in 2009-10 was the Eastman Professor to Oxford, and fellow at Balliol College.

Nick Hubble is Senior Lecturer in English and Deputy Director of the Brunel Centre for Contemporary Writing (BCCW). He is a Co-Investigator on the three-year (2009-2012) ESRC-funded Fiction and the Cultural Mediation of Ageing Project (FCMAP), which is part of the New Dynamics of Ageing programme.

Nick holds a BA in Philosophy and Literature (Essex), a PGCE in Secondary English (Sussex), an MA in Critical Theory (Sussex), a DPhil in English Literature (Sussex) and a PGCert in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education (Brunel). He has formerly worked as a Research Fellow at the Centre for Suburban Studies, Kingston University and as Lecturer in English at the University of Central England, Birmingham. He has also taught for the English Subject Group at the University of Sussex and held the position of Honorary Research Fellow at the Mass-Observation Archive.

Prior to joining Brunel in 2010, Wendy was a Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of the Americas at University of London (2007-09). For her research on Patrick Chamoiseau, she was awarded a Social Science and Humanities Council of Canada postdoctoral fellowship (2003-05) in affiliation with Harvard University and New York University. She holds a doctorate in Comparative Literature from University of Toronto.

She has taught Caribbean and twentieth-century literatures and theory at Queen Mary and Humboldt University in Berlin. In Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom, she worked for a number of years as a marketing consultant and entrepreneur in the IT sector.

James Knowles specialises in early modern literature and culture (1500-1700) and has published widely on early modern drama especially Jonson, Marlowe, Marston, Middleton, and Shakespeare. He is an internationally recognised expert on the court masque and civic pageantry and has written on literary and cultural geographies, orientalism, patronage and collecting, manliness and sexuality, verse libel and manuscript culture. He also retains a wider interest in gender, sexualities, and book culture including modern and contemporary gay writing and queer theory.

Bill has been at Brunel since 1996, when he began his PhD studies in Shakespeare’s History plays and Elizabethan Processional literature. Immediately before that, he worked as an English Language teacher for the Adult Education Service in Berlin, Germany. Bill moved there in July 1989 and witnessed the historic fall of the Berlin Wall in November of that year. He married his wife, Christiane in September 1995 and then moved back to England. He has two sons.

Claire Lynch studied at the University of Kent and took her doctorate at the University of Oxford. She is a Lecturer in English, specialising in autobiography and contemporary British and Irish literature.

She is a member of the International Association of Studies in Irish Literatures (IASIL) and a council member and web editor for the British Association of Irish Studies (BAIS). Claire is on the board of the South Asian Diaspora Literature and Arts Archive (SALIDAA) and founding co-Editor and now Advisory Board Member of H-Memory, the international discussion and review resource.

Claire is the Co-ordinator for the English Peer-Assisted Learning Scheme at Brunel (PALS) and Editor of the School of Arts Touchpoint Newsletter.

Anshuman Mondal is a Reader in English, specialising in post-colonial studies. He joined Brunel in 2006 for the second time, having begun his career here in 2000 as a temporary Lecturer, before moving to a permanent post at the University of Leicester from 2002-6. He has been Subject Leader since 2009.

He is the author of Nationalism and Post-Colonial Identity: Culture and Ideology in India and Egypt (RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), Amitav Ghosh (Manchester University Press, 2007), and Young British Muslim Voices, an account of his journey across the UK talking to young Muslims.

In 2004, Anshuman led an international project on 'Faith and Secularism' sponsored by Counterpoint, the cultural relations think-tank of the British Council, and wrote the Introduction to the pamphlet Faith and Secularism, part of the Birthday Counterpoint series, which was published by the British Council to mark its 70th anniversary. He has also published journalism in the leading current affairs magazine Prospect, and also The Guardian’s ‘Comment is Free’. He also writes a current affairs blog called Human Zoo (http://anshumanmondal.wordpress.com/).

Anshuman is on the Open Executive of the Postcolonial Studies Association and Chair of its Conference Committee.

Jago Morrison is a specialist in contemporary literature. His key areas of expertise are:

· Postcolonial writing in English, with a special interest in Chinua Achebe
· Contemporary women’s writing
· Literary approaches to ageing

Jago welcomes expressions of interest from research students interested in studying to MPhil and PhD level in his specialist areas, including from candidates wishing to pursue critical/creative research projects.
Jago is an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Peer Reviewer and represents Brunel at the Council for College and University English (CCUE).

Before coming to Brunel, William was Professor of English at the University of Sussex, where he directed the Centre for the Study of Sexual Dissidence and Cultural Change for five years. Prior to his appointment at Sussex, he taught at Cardiff University, Columbia University, and Illinois State University.

Situated at the nexus of queer studies, postcolonial studies, and critical and cultural theory, William’s interdisciplinary research encompasses the analysis of a broad range of literary, cultural, and critical texts spanning from the fin de siècle to the 20th and 21st centuries.

The texts with which he works cross national, geographic, and linguistic boundaries and include British and American texts, and those located within francophone and Germanic cultures, southern Africa, and the wider African diaspora. His recent work has contributed to the formulation of new theoretical thinking at the conjunction of postcolonial and queer enquiry.

Philip Tew is Professor of English (Post-1900 Literature) at Brunel, the elected Director of the UK Network for Modern Fiction Studies, Director of the Brunel Centre for Contemporary Writing (BCCW), Co-Editor of both Critical Engagements and of Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a member of the Royal Society of Literature. He was invited recently to join the editorial board of the US-based journal, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction. Locally in Brunel's School of Arts he serves as English Research Co-ordinator and Deputy Head of School for Research (Students & Strategy).

Tew’s monographs published are B. S. Johnson: A Critical Reading (Manchester UP, 2001), The Contemporary British Novel (Continuum, 2004; Serbian trans. Svetovi, 2006; rev. 2nd edition Continuum, 2007); Jim Crace: A Critical Introduction (Manchester UP, 2006), and Zadie Smith (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). To date he has edited four collections in the field of contemporary British Fiction: Contemporary British Fiction, with Richard J. Lane and Rod Mengham (Polity, 2003); British Fiction Today: Critical Essays with Rod Mengham (Continuum, 2006); Teaching Contemporary British Fiction [special issue of Anglistik und Englischunterricht] with Steve Barfield, Anja Muller-Wood and Leigh Wilson (Universitätsverlag Winter, 2007); and Re-Reading B. S. Johnson with Glyn White (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Tew is also co-editor of several book series, including Palgrave’s New British Fiction Series and the new Continuum Handbook Series. He has numerous other publications in various fields.

For a number of years recently Tew’s research has been very largely concerned with the fields of social gerontology and social narrative theories. With Brunel's Dr. Nick Hubble he is currently preparing a study entitled Ageing, Narrative and Identity: New Qualitative Social Research; please see the 'Research and Teaching' tab on this webpage for further details.

Please note that prospective research students interested in being supervised by Prof. Tew should also consult the 'Research and Teaching' tab of his webpage.