The English and Creative Writing Team at Staffordshire University are engaged in a variety of writing and research projects.
The team
I teach American and contemporary British literature. My favourite modules are on crime fiction and Beat writing. I wasn’t aware of it at first, but much of my teaching revolves around novels concerned with drugs, sex and death – often all at the same time (see American Psycho for extensive illustrations).
My research is in American urban fiction, and particularly New York fictions. I have published extensively on the poetry, novels and films of Paul Auster.
Dr Catherine Burgass
I teach nineteenth-, twentieth-century and contemporary British/American literature with specialist options in regional literature and feminism. My research interests include the semiotics of hair and food (not together) and domestic fiction.
Dr Catherine Burgass: Full profile
Dr Melanie Ebdon
My teaching and research interests include ecocriticism, post-colonialism, Gothic literature and magical realist writing. I am currently working on the novels of Sarah Hall, employing a broadly ecofeminist analysis.
Dr Melanie Ebdon: Full profile
Paul Houghton
My main interest is in contemporary and post-war fiction and I’m particularly interested in short stories and gothic fiction.
Dr Martin Jesinghausen
My main areas of teaching are in 19th century writing, Modernism, Postmodern culture, and the theory and history of the theatre.
Dr Martin Jesinghausen: Full profile
My focus is developing Scriptwriting, as an academic subject, by exploring, cinema’s roots in photography and painting, as well as its roots in literature.
Margaret LeClere: Full profile
Dr Lisa Mansell
I am a poetry specialist working with procedural and Avant-Garde movements. My PhD is in Critical and Creative Writing, and I hold an MA in the Teaching and Practice of Creative Writing, both from Cardiff University.
My expertise covers European philosophy; postgraduate research methods. My research interests are in the areas of Kant, Nietzsche, hermeneutics, and philosophy’s relation to the arts, especially literature, fine art and wine. I have also written on hermeneutic issues in political theory.
Current projects include a Nietzsche Dictionary for Bloomsbury-Continuum, a commissioned paper on early Nietzsche, and a book (co-authored with Ole Martin Skilleas of the University of Bergen) presenting a general theory of contextual aesthetics.