Staff in the School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication

EMERITUS STAFF 

• Isobel Armstrong, Fellow of the College Isobel Armstrong is a Fellow of the British Academy, Senior Research Fellow of the Institute of English Studies and Professor Emeritus of what is now the Geoffrey Tillotson Chair. During her time at Birkbeck, she founded the London Seminar for Nineteenth-Century Studies and the Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies. During retirement she has taught at the universities of Harvard and Johns Hopkins and spoken at international conferences. She is also a published poet. Visit Isobel Armstrong's fellows page.
• Laurel Brake, Professor Emerita of English Literature and Print Culture Visit Laurel Brake's fellows page or email Laurel Brake.
• Dr Carolyn Burdett
• Sandra Clark After retiring from Birkbeck in 2006, Sandra Clark became Acting, Deputy Director and then Director of the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London until 2012. Her special interest is in Shakespeare and early modern drama and popular literature. She is the author of six books and numerous articles and chapters in books and is also the Series Editor of the Arden Shakespeare Dictionaries.
• Professor Jean Marc Dewaele
• Professor Alison Finlay, Honorary Life Member of the College Alison's research interests are primarily in Old Icelandic. She has worked on the Icelandic poets’ sagas and other sagas of Icelanders, and is currently engaged on a translation of the historical text Heimskringla, in collaboration with Anthony Faulkes. Alison is also involved in re-editing the corpus of Old Norse skaldic poetry, and is editing verses for Volume 1 of Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages. She is currently editing, with Martin Arnold, a collection of articles on the fornaldarsögur. She is also writing a book provisionally called Skalds and Sagas, about the characterisation and function of poets in the Norse-Icelandic Kings’ sagas and the sagas of Icelanders.
• Professor Carmen Fracchia
• Hilary Fraser Hilary Fraser came to Birkbeck in 2002 to take up the Geoffrey Tillotson Chair of Nineteenth-Century Studies. As Director of the Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies, Hilary was the founding editor of its online journal, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century. She is a published author and has written monographs on the Victorians and Renaissance Italy, aesthetics and religion in Victorian writing, nineteenth-century non-fiction prose, and gender and the Victorian periodical. She has been President of the British Association for Victorian Studies since 2015. Email Hilary Fraser.
• Tom Healy
• Russell Celyn Jones Russell Celyn Jones set up the MA Creative Writing course at Birkbeck in 2003 and was its director for 12 years. His short fiction has been anthologised around the world and Soldiers and Innocents was serialised on BBC Radio 4. He has been a freelance feature writer for the Observer, Guardian, Independent, Time Out and Sunday Times, and a book reviewer for The Times for 15 years. Prizes he has judged include the Man Booker Prize, The Royal Society of Literature Ondaatji Prize and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. He also chaired the annual Man Booker event at Birkbeck.
• Peter Mudford
• Mpalive-Hangson Msiska, Reader in English and Humanities Mpalive has previously studied in Malawi, Canada, Germany and Scotland and has taught at the Universities of Malawi, Stirling and Bath Spa. External responsibilities include being examiner or joint-supervisor of PhD theses, BA and MA Programmes at other Universities in Britain and abroad. He is a member of the Wole Soyinka Society, The Royal African Society and the Association of the African Studies in the UK (ASAUK) and a Board Member of The Canon Collins Trust, dedicated to sourcing scholarships to enable qualified students from Southern Africa undertake higher education either in Africa or the United Kingdom.
• Michael Slater, Fellow of the College Michael Slater is one of the most highly regarded scholars of nineteenth-century literature. From 1958 to 1977 he edited The Dickensian and he served as president both of the International Dickens Fellowship and of the Dickens Society of America. He has always been actively involved in the affairs of Dickens House Museum. Michael worked and taught continuously at Birkbeck for 36 years and has taught and lectured in the US, across Europe, Australasia and the Far East.
• Colin Teevan Professor of Playwriting and Screenwriting, Colin teaches writing for stage screen and radio at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Colin's stagework has been performed all over the world. He is a long term collaborator with many of the world’s foremost theatre practitioners including Kathryn Hunter, Sir Peter Hall, Hideki Noda, Walter Meirjohann and Dalia Ibelhauptaite. Colin has written more than ten full-length plays for BBC Radios 3 and 4 including the award-winning Glass Houses (2007). 
• Dr Silke Arnold-de Simine, Reader Emerita in Memory and Cultural Studies Dr Arnold-de-Simine's work is concerned with (trans-)media aesthetics and ethics, tracing the pathways and following the transnational flow of commemorative practices across a range of different media forms and contexts such as screen media, (digital) archives, museums and heritage sites. She is the co-director of the BIRMAC research centre (Birkbeck Interdisciplinary Research in Media and Culture) and is currently working on a book entitled Memory in 3D: Holograms and Digital Afterlives
• Jean Braybrook, Honorary Life Member of the College
• Penelope Gardner-Chloros, Professor Emerita of Sociolinguistics and Language Contact Penelope specialised in Code-switching and is the author of the 2009 volume ‘Code-switching’ (CUP), as well as another monograph on language in Strasbourg, a co-edited volume on Vernacular Literacy and over 60 peer-reviewed articles in journals and books. Since her retirement, she has been working on a biography of El Greco. An ‘Essential Knowledge’ volume for MIT Press on Bilingualism is also in preparation. She lives in Oxford and in Greece.
• Professor Robin Howells Robin Howells specialises in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French literature and culture (classicism and, principally, Enlightenment). He also uses paradigms from Bakhtin (carnivalesque, dialogism, polemical stupidity) to examine aspects of literature generally. His main research interests are Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and the writing and visual arts of the late eighteenth century. Email Professor Robin Howells
• Professor John Kraniauskas, Professor Emeritus in Latin American Studies John Kraniauskas is a specialist in Latin American literary and cultural studies, cultural theory and political philosophy with particular interests in relations between state and cultural forms. John was a founding co-editor of the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies. Email Professor John Kraniauskas 
• Professor Laura Mulvey
• Professor Maria Elena Placencia María Elena Placencia is Professor Emerita of Linguistics and Spanish. Her research interests include (digital) discourse analysis, sociopragmatics and variational pragmatics. She has published extensively in these areas and has contributed chapters to several handbooks (e.g., Pragmatics of Social Media; Pragmatics of Society, Pragmática) and to numerous other international volumes. She has also (co-)edited several special issues and volumes focusing on a range of topics such as service encounters, small talk, discourse markers, and complimenting behaviour. She is on the editorial board of several international journals. Email Professor Maria Elena Placencia, and View Maria Elena Placencia's website 
• Professor Patrick Pollard Patrick Pollard is professor of French, nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, Gide, the classical tradition, and gender. His research interests include the history of ideas (with an emphasis on nineteenth- to twentieth-century France), history of literature, history of homosexuality and the classical tradition in France, specifically the history of the translation of Greek and Latin authors into French, the modern reuse of ancient myths, and gender and sexuality. He has been a member of the Association des Amis d’André Gide since its inception, and is currently Honorary Treasurer of the Emile Zola Society, London. Email Professor Patrick Pollard
• Mme Madeleine Renouard, Emerita Reader in French Madeleine Renouard's most recent co-edited book Barbara Wright Translation As Art was published in 2013 by Dalkey Archive Press. She is currently editing the poet Lorand Gaspar's hospital diaries and notes. Madeleine was for many years Editor of La Chouette journal.
• Dr Martin Shipway
• Professor Ian Short, Emeritus Professor of French Ian Short's research interests include medieval studies, in particular French vernacular literature, Anglo-Norman, and the epic. Email Professor Ian Short
• Professor Michael Temple
• Professor John Walker, Emeritus Reader in German Intellectual History Professor Walker's research has been chiefly in the field of nineteenth-century German literature and philosophy. His current research interest is in the relevance of German and German-Jewish philosophy to intercultural and interfaith dialogue, in which he has a personal as well as an academic interest. His book Wilhelm von Humboldt and Transcultural Communication in a Multicultural World will appear in October 2022 with Boydell and Brewer (Rochester, NY). He continues to be involved with a number of research projects in this field and welcomes enquiries from like-minded scholars. Email John Walker
• Professor David Wells Email David Wells

RESEARCH FELLOWS AND VISITING PROFESSORS

• Professor Stacey Abbott, Honorary Research Fellowship Stacey Abbott is Professor of Film and Television at Northumbria University.  Her research focuses on horror film and television, with a particular interest in the vampire and zombie. She has also published extensively on Cult TV.  She is the author of the BFI Film Classic on Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark (2020), Undead Apocalypse: Vampire and Zombies in the 21st Century (2016), co-author of TV Horror (2013) and co-editor of Global TV Horror (2021), both with Lorna Jowett. She and Jowett are currently co-writing a book on Women Creators of TV Horror. Abbott is also writing a monograph on Horror Animation. 
• Dr Mike Allen, Honorary Research Fellowship
• Ms Holly Aylett, Honorary Research Fellowship
• Mr Dickie Beau, Honorary Research Fellowship
• Dr Mike Bintley, Honorary Research Fellowship
• Professor Daniel Brown, Visiting Professor
• Dr Marcos Centeno, Honorary Research Fellowship Marcos Centeno is lecturer in Film, Media and Japanese Studies at University of Valencia. At Birkbeck, Centeno was the Japanese Programme director and was responsible for creating the single honours BA Japanese Studies. Before that, Centeno had been lecturer at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies) where he convened the MA Global Cinemas and the Transcultural. His main research interests revolve around Japanese Documentary Film, non-fiction formats, film theory, postwar avant-garde, transnationality, memory of WWII in Asia and the representation of minorities, particularly the Ainu people. He has coordinated projects on transculturality and documentary film funded by institutions such as Eurasia Foundation, Sasakawa, Daiwa, Japan Foundation and the Japanese Ministry of Education.
• Dr Daniela Cerimonia, Honorary Research Fellowship
• Dr Sally Cook, Honorary Research Fellowship My research explores multilingualism, second-language acquisition, social justice, human rights, asylum seekers, refugees, modern slavery, trauma, and rehabilitation. Identifying as an applied linguist within an interdisciplinary framework, I returned to the UK in 2014 after many years in Italy. Volunteering in a London-based therapeutic- community for torture survivors became the catalyst for my PhD. Specifically, I delve into the intricacies of learning and using English in the context of exile, analysing its impact on participants' healing journeys. Currently, a longitudinal follow-up enhances my exploration, aiming for deeper insights into the temporal, contextual and relational aspects of these phenomena.
• Dr Beverley Costa, Senior Practitioner Fellowship
• Dr Laura Cushing-Harries, Associate Research Fellowship
• Dr Isabel Davis, Honorary Research Fellowship Isabel Davis is Research Leader at the Natural History Museum, co-ordinating Arts and Humanities Research. Her research interests include cultural histories of reproductive health, 'one health', environmental studies, premodern literature and culture, and museum collections.
• Dr Tom Dillon, Associate Research Fellowship
• Dr Lina Džuverović, Honorary Research Fellowship Dr Lina Džuverović is a curator and Course Leader on the MA Curating & Collections, Chelsea College of Art. She is currently co-curating the 60th October Salon, Belgrade, Serbia, 2024. Lina's research focuses on collectivity in art and approaches the process of writing feminist art histories as a site of solidarity and community-building. Her current research project And Others: The Gendered Politics and Practices of Art Collectives, was awarded Bard College’s Centre for Arts and Human Rights Faculty Fellowship (2022). Previously Lina was Artistic Director of London’s Calvert 22 Foundation; founding Director of Electra, Media Arts Curator at ICA, London, co-curator of Momentum Biennial 2009 and has taught contemporary art in the UK and Austria. View Dr Lina Džuverović's website
• Dr Dickon Edwards, Associate Research Fellowship
  
• Dr Maria Sanz Ferrer, Honorary Research Fellowship
• Dr Lynne Flowerdew, Honorary Research Fellowship Lynne Flowerdew holds a PhD in Applied Linguistics from the University of Liverpool, UK. Her main research and teaching interests include corpus linguistics, ESP/EAP (English for Specific Purposes/English for Academic Purposes), discourse analysis, genre analysis and L2/multilingual academic writing. She has published widely in these areas in international journals and edited volumes and has also authored and co-edited several books on corpus linguistics. She has served as a member of several international conference scientific committees and as an editorial board member of international journals in her fields of expertise.
• Professor John Flowerdew, Honorary Research Fellowship John Flowerdew is an applied linguist, focusing on discourse studies and language education. He is currently a visiting professor at Lancaster University and an honorary research fellow at Birkbeck, University of London. Previously he was a professor at City University of Hong Kong and at University of Leeds. He is active in research and publication and is regularly invited to speak at international conferences. Notable more recent books are Introducing English for Research Publication Purposes (with P. Habibie) (Routledge); Signalling Nouns in Discourse: A Corpus-Based Discourse Approach (with R.W. Forest) (CUP); The Routledge Handbook of Critical Discourse Studies (with J. Richardson); and Discourse in English Language Education (Routledge). 
• Dr Carles Fuster, Honorary Research Fellowship
• Professor Christine Geraghty, Honorary Research Fellowship
• Dr David Gillott, Honorary Research Fellowship I was awarded my PhD in 2013 for my thesis, Authority, Authorship, and Lamarckian Self-Fashioning in the Works of Samuel Butler (1835–1902), supervised by Carolyn Burdett. My monograph, Samuel Butler against the Professionals: Rethinking Lamarckism 1860–1900 was published by Legenda in 2015. Since 2013 I have been Editorial Assistant for 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, published by Open Library of Humanities.
• Professor Catherine Grant, Honorary Research Fellowship
• Dr Tobias Harris, Associate Research Fellowship Tobias W. Harris is an Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London. His research interests include James Joyce, Flann O’Brien, critical theory and technology. He has published essays in edited collections on Flann O'Brien by Cork University Press and in the journals Estudios Irlandeses and Modernist Cultures. Tobias is the winner of the ‘Best Essay-Length Study on a Brian O’Nolan Theme (2015–16)’ prize for an essay published in The Parish Review: Journal of Flann O’Brien Studies. As well as a running his podcast, Radio Myles, he is currently working on a monograph about Flann O’Brien and the European avant-garde.
• Dr Hallvard Haug, Associate Research Fellowship
• Dr Sophie Hope, Honorary Research Fellowship
• Dr Chris Horrie, Honorary Research Fellowship
• Dr Paul Ingram, Associate Research Fellowship
• Dr Robyn Jakeman, Associate Research Fellowship
• Dr Simon Jarrett, Honorary Research Fellowship
• Professor Adam Jaworski, Honorary Research Fellowship
• Professor Kyoung Hee Joung, Honorary Research Fellowship
  
• Professor Douglas Kerr, Honorary Research Fellowship
• Dr Janette Leaf, Honorary Research Fellowship Dr Janette Leaf’s interdisciplinary research focuses on fin-de-siècle Gothic; the Weird; Neo-Victorianism; Cultural Entomology; Egyptomania; Redheads; and Ghost Ships. She has published in Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies and Victorian Popular Fictions, and online for The British Society for Literature and Science and Birkbeck Environmental Humanities. She is writing chapters on “Spectral Insects” and “Angry Redheads” for edited collections, and a monograph on Insect Imagery. She co-edited Crawling Horror: Creeping Tales of the Insect Weird (British Library Publishing, 2021). She read English at Newnham; holds Masters from the University of Cambridge and University of Hertfordshire; and a PhD from Birkbeck.
  
• Professor Michael Lewis, Honorary Research Fellowship
• Mr Brian Logan, Honorary Research Fellowship
• Professor Ana Laura Lopez de la Torre, Honorary Research Fellowship
• Ms Elizabeth Lynch, Honorary Research Fellowship works with artists, organisations and communities as a strategic advisor and researcher. She is interested in arts and science collaborations, youth arts, creative ageing practices and in making cultural democracy happen. Chair of Theatre-Rites, Co-Chair Creative Ageing: Development & Agency, Trustee for I Am Irish, What Next UK Leadership Group.
• Dr James Machin, Honorary Research Fellowship
• Ms Ingrid Mackinnon, Honorary Research Fellowship, Ingrid is a movement director, choreographer and intimacy. She has recently worked with theatre companies such as Regents Park, Bristol Old Vic, Donmar, Almeida, Stratford East and National Theatre. In 2021, she won a Black British Theatre Award for best choreography for her work on Romeo & Juliet at Regents Park Open Air Theatre. She also sits on the Board of Trustees for Dancers Career Development, a charity which supports dancers through personal and professional change. Her research is focused on the Black moving body and embodied knowledge. 
• Dr Bronwen Martin, Honorary Research Fellowship
• Mr Phillip McMahon, Honorary Research Fellowship Phillip McMahon is a playwright and theatre director based between Dublin and London. His work has shown at The Abbey and The Gate Theatres in Dublin; The National Theatre, London; and venues around the world. His most recent play, Once Before I Go has recently been added to Ireland's Leaving Certificate syllabus. He is co-founder and co-director of Irish theatre juggernauts, THISISPOPBABY.
• Professor Mandy Merck, Honorary Research Fellowship Mandy Merck is Professor Emerita of Media Arts at Royal Holloway and an Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck 2023-4. Her last book was Cinema’s Melodramatic Celebrity: Film, Fame and Personal Worth. Her next is provisionally titled Downsizing: Film and the Miniature.
• Dr Sharona Moskowitz, Associate Research Fellowship
• Dr Jeremy Newton, Honorary Research Fellowship Jeremy Newton completed his PhD in Nineteenth-Century Theatre and Culture at Birkbeck in May 2022. His thesis dealt with the works of the forgotten Victorian playwright Henry Arthur Jones, and offered a reappraisal of his importance in the history of English drama. Jeremy’s first degree was in English and American Literature at the University of Warwick, and he also has Masters degrees from the Shakespeare Institute (University of Birmingham) and from the University of Oxford. Jeremy is a regular speaker at conferences on Victorian theatre and culture.
• Dr Sean O'Brien, Honorary Research Fellowship
• Dr Louise Owen, Honorary Research Fellowship
• Ms Diane Page, Honorary Research Fellowship Diane is an award-winning theatre director, winning the 2021 JMK Award for her production of Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act staged at the Orange Tree Theatre. Training: MFA Theatre Directing (Birkbeck University), BA Theatre and Drama Studies (First Class. Hons, Birkbeck University). Theatre as Director; The Tempest (Shakespeare’s Globe), Yellowman (Orange Tree Theatre), Julius Caesar (Shakespeare’s Globe), Lost and Found (Royal Opera House), Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act (Orange Tree Theatre), Out West (Co- director, Lyric Hammersmith Theatre).
• Ms Deborah Pearson, Honorary Research Fellowship
• Professor Martha Pennington, Honorary Research Fellowship
• Professor Lance Pettitt, Associate Research Fellowship
• Dr Flora Pitrolo, Honorary Research Fellowship
• Professor Zoe Playdon, Honorary Research Fellowship
• Professor Michael Robertson, Honorary Research Fellowship is Professor Emeritus of English at The College of New Jersey. He received the BA from Stanford, the MA from Columbia, and the PhD from Princeton. He is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships and author of three award-winning books on nineteenth-century literature and culture: The Last Utopians (Princeton UP, 2018), Worshipping Walt: The Whitman Disciples (Princeton UP, 2008), and Stephen Crane, Journalism, and the Making of Modern American Literature (Columbia UP, 1997). He is writing a biography of the artist, writer and socialist William Morris.
• Dr Louise Rolland, Honorary Research Fellowship
• Dr Emma Sandon, Honorary Research Fellowship My research focus is on early British film and television history, British colonial film and photography and African film history. I am Co-I on the AHRC funded Colonial Reels: Histories and Afterlives of Colonial Film Collections, 2024 – 2027, and was on the core management team of the Colonial Film: Moving Images of the British Empire project. I am a Director of the June Givanni Pan African Cinema Archive, a Research Associate at the Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative at the University of Cape Town, and a steering group of the Women’s Film and Television History Network (UK and Ireland).
• Dr Henghameh Saroukhani, Honorary Research Fellowship
• Dr Justin Schlosberg, Honorary Research Fellowship
• Dr Sue Short, Honorary Research Fellowship
• Dr Sarah Sigal, Honorary Research Fellowship Originally from Chicago and based in London, Sarah Sigal is a freelance writer, dramaturg, director and researcher working across new writing, devising, site-specific theatre, film and fiction. She has taught at numerous British universities and adapted her monograph Writing in Collaborative Theatre-Making (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) from her PhD. She is a Dramaturgs’ Network Advisory Board Member and has recently published her first novel The Socialite Spy (Lume Books, 2023).
• Mr Steven Spencer, Honorary Research Fellowship Steven Spencer is an Honorary Research Fellow in Birkbeck’s Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies. He holds an MA in History (Canterbury Christ Church University, 2005) and a Graduate Diploma in Archives and Records Management (UCL, 2008). He is Director of The Salvation Army International Heritage Centre and his research focuses on the temperance movement, periodicals and architecture, which has been published in Social History of Alcohol and Drugs, Chapels Society Journal and Twentieth Century Architecture.
• Dr Robert Stearn, Associate Research Fellowship
• Dr Alda Terracciano, Honorary Research Fellowship
• Dr Michael Warren, Honorary Research Fellowship
• Professor Jo Winning, Honorary Research Fellowship Jo is Professor of Modern Literature and Critical Theory, and Head of School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures & Linguistics, Faculty of Arts, Monash University, Melbourne. She has published widely on 20th-century and 21st-century literature, culture, theory and practice, with particular focus on modernism and the avant-garde. She also researches in the field of medical humanities, examining the relations between illness, language and patient subjectivity, and the interface between critical theory in the humanities and clinical practice in medicine. Jo was at Birkbeck from 2003-2023, in the Department of English, Theatre and Creative Writing. She was Assistant Dean for Equalities (2017-21) and College Dean (2021-23).
• Dr Kit Yee Wong, Associate Research Fellowship
• Dr Jian Xu, Associate Research Fellowship